UK Pensions Checklist: Get Clear on Where you Stand Right Now

Now we understand the importance of keeping a track of pensions, let's see how we can resolve any issues.

Fill any Gaps

If you have gaps in your pension timeline because you have no records at all of the plan you had, then don’t despair. Firstly, contact the company you worked for and speak to their pension/HR department. They’ll have records, even if you don’t. With your date of birth and NI number, they should be able to trace you.

If your old company is no longer in existence, then it might be a bit trickier, but there is still a pot of money out there in the ether somewhere with your name on it, so don’t give up.

A bit of judicious Googling should tell you what your old company is now a part of, if it was bought out or merged with another company. If it folded, then either the pension scheme went with it or was protected somehow. Many pensions were run by insurance companies, separate to the employer, who simply sponsored it.

It might just be a case of tracking down which insurance company provided the pension scheme for your old employer. The government pension tracing service is a good place to start.

Get a Handle on Things

Once you have all the information on your pensions to hand, it’ll likely be a handful of sheaves of paper, or emails or whatever. I suggest you get on top of things by consolidating the information itself. You should create a one-page summary of each pension, with the following information on it:

• Fund value – what is the pension worth right now?
• Transfer value – what will it be worth if you were to move it to another provider?
• Charges – what does it cost to hold that pension? There will be product charges, possibly fund charges on top and maybe even an adviser charge, which is especially galling if you haven’t heard from that adviser in years
• Safeguarded benefits – these are special benefits attached to a pension like enhanced tax-free cash or guaranteed annuity rates. These are increasingly rare, but if you have them, they can be valuable
• Funds – what funds are you currently invested in, and what are the options for choosing alternative funds within the plan?
• DB schemes – what are the deferred benefits and what might they be at the scheme retirement age? Ask for a full scheme booklet, or a link to a website with the information on

You might need to get on the phone to the provider to get this information as it may not all be available on the statement you have from 2006. Get bang up-to-date information and create a one-page summary of each of your pension plans, so you know what you’ve got.

Decide Whether to Consolidate

Armed with this information, you need to decide whether or not to consolidate all your plans into one. I can help you with that.

Firstly, if you’re currently paying into a pension plan through your employer, leave that where it is. What we’re talking about doing here is potentially shifting all your old, ‘frozen’ plans into a new, more dynamic pot where you’re being more intentional about the management of the money.

If you subsequently move companies from where you are now, you can add the current pension to your personal plan after that time. Why might you consolidate? Three key reasons:

1. To save money – often, a new, more modern pension might be cheaper than the old ones you hold, especially if there’s decent values in there. There is no sense in chucking money away unnecessarily in costs if you don’t have to.
2. To invest more intelligently – some old pensions are very limited in the underlying investments you can choose. A pension is merely an account after all, what matters is the money inside it and how it is invested.
3. To keep things organised and front-of-mind – this is reason enough to consolidate, in my view. You’re likely to get a better result out of having your pensions more up-to-date and active, even if the new pension is a bit more expensive than the old one. Simply being more deliberate about things is a value-add, and if it takes consolidation onto a modern platform you can view on your phone, then that’s totally worth it.

So take a view – should you consolidate or not?

A quick word on Defined Benefit pensions: I’ve done podcasts on this area before, so search the Learning Centre on the Meaningful Money website. Be very careful when considering transferring DB pensions; it’s a minefield. Standard wisdom is that for most people, it makes sense to leave them where they are.

These are pensions where you get the promise of a future income rather than a fund value. You can ask DB pension trustees to transfer out your benefits where they give you a lump sum, which can be added into a normal pension in return for you releasing them of your liabilities to you.

Yes, there are definitely exceptions to that, and I get frequent emails from listeners asking if I can advise them on this. The answer is no, and I also can’t refer you to anyone I trust who would still do this kind of business. Enough said about that, I think – just tread very carefully.