Just like finding lost money owed to you (say, from a security deposit on an apartment), lots of folks have pension benefits that they don’t know about or have lost track of! Personally, I know I don’t have pension benefits because I wasn’t at my first job long enough and my current one doesn’t offer a pension but it’s easy to lose track when you move around often, forget to leave forwarding addresses, and, surprisingly, get married and change your name. In a Bankrate.com article, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC, the same one that bails out bankrupt pension plans for pennies on the dollar) reported that the average lost account was worth over $5000 with the highest lost pension over $255k!
If you want to find out if you may have pension benefits floating out there somewhere, the PBGC has a free tool which lets you search “missing pension funds by last name, the name of the company for which the participant worked or by state.” If you can’t find the company, another tool “allows [you] to search by pension plan name, PBGC case number or the company’s name.”
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One response to “Finding Lost Pension Benefits”
I worked for a company that went bankrupt. An old boss told me that the Pension Plan was paid out but since I have moved many times, I never heard anything. PBGC does not have the company listed. The original company was called Burnham and Company, later merged to Drexel, Burnham and Lambert and I believe when they went belly up, they may have been Drexel, Lambert. This is the company where Mike Milken, the infamous junk bond trader worked. Can you tell me where else I might look? Thanks.
Lorraine Butler