Martin Lewis shares ‘well worth doing’ pension check | Personal Finance | Finance

Martin Lewis has issued advice about a “relatively easy” pensions check that could be well worth your time. The consumer expert shared some tips after a question came on his BBC podcast about managing your retirement savings.

A fan of the show asked if there is a way to quickly track down your pensions savings pots. She explained that she was asking on behalf of her husband, who had had many jobs over the years and was unsure how much he had saved up in his various retirement pots.

In response, Mr Lewis had some good news for the woman as there are two “relatively easy ways” to track down your pensions. He said one option is to use the Pension Tracing Service on the Government website.

This tool can help you find the contact details for your pension provider. Mr Lewis explained the steps to use the tool and a simple question to ask: “What you can do there is you can tell it all your past employers, and it will tell you who to contact.

“So, for example, if your old employer is sold or moved on, or its pension service has moved on, it will tell you who now has the liability, where that pension is kept. And then you get in touch with them, and you write to them, and you say, ‘I have a pension with you, how much is it worth, please?'”

£100,000 boost

He said he has heard of people being “shocked” to discover through this service that they have more than £100,000 in pensions. Mr Lewis explained why: “If you started a pension when you were 21, and you put a little bit in, and it’s sat there and it was in a good investment, and you forgot about it, and you check back when you’re 50, and you think it’s going to be nothing, and I have had people who go, ‘I’ve got £110,000!’ You know, it can be like that. So it is well worth doing.”

He said although this can take some work to use the tool, a key advantage is it will have details of “almost every firm”, so you have a good chance of finding your provider. Mr Lewis’ other suggestion is even easier to use.

He told listeners: “Another way to do it is there’s a fintech firm called Gretel. Now, it’s much easier to do. What you do with Gretel is you basically put your details in, and it does a search for you on every company in its database. So, instead of you having to write and go through that whole process, it’ll just tell you, ‘You’ve got a pension in this place.’

‘Decent range’

“It will give you that information, and it’ll do it for all other lost assets too.” He said that Gretel works by pension providers subcontracting to Gretel to do these searches, as the pension firms have a legal responsibility to try and unite people with their lost assets.

But there is drawback here. Mr Lewis said: “With Gretel, it only works with the companies that work with it. Now, it does have a pretty decent range of big providers, but it is not fully comprehensive.

“So, if I were doing this, I would use the official service, but I would probably, in all honesty, I’d use Gretel first, see what Gretel comes up with, and then for the ones that aren’t on Gretel, I would then go to the Pension Tracing Service and see what I find. Because I think that would be the easiest way around to do it.”