The Case of The Missing Pension

co-housing reverses the typical pattern of retirees becoming more isolated as they age. At EcoVillage, teams of residents cook for the communal meals held three times a week and maintain the grounds. There are frequent movie nights and special celebrations. The Community Health and Aging Team (CHAT) brings meals to ill and homebound residents and arranges transportation to doctor appointments. “It makes me feel younger to associate with all these younger people,” says Richard Hepburn, 82, a retired pilot and EcoVillage resident who had meals delivered by CHAT after having thyroid surgery in January.

Living in close proximity with neighbors also can give rise to conflict. “Pets and guns are always the issues,” says Alice Alexander, executive director of the Cohousing Association and a resident of the Durham Central Park Cohousing Community in North Carolina, which bans guns and forbids pets to roam unsupervised. At EcoVillage, divergent parenting styles can be a source of tension. “Some children are more free-range,” says cofounder Liz Walker, which sometimes “impinges on other people.” Yet she stresses that disputes are rarely allowed to fester: “Because many people want to be here for the rest of our lives, we’re in a position of having to work out these conflicts.” The bottom line The U.S. is home to more than 150 co-housing communities, with 14 more planned exclusively for seniors. Tracking down a plan from a former employer can be difficult As a baby boomer, I joined the labor force when many jobs still came with an old-style pension, the kind that pays a fixed monthly sum in retirement. Although pension plans have been largely phased out in favor of 401(k) and individual retirement accounts, those of us who paid into them are entitled to the benefits we accrued.

Getting our hands on the money may not be easy, as I recently learned when I decided to take inventory of my retirement assets. Job-hopping workers, corporate upheaval, and spotty record keeping have left billions of dollars owed to Americans in limbo. “It’s a vast problem that has a huge impact on retirement security,” says Jeanne Medeiros, director of the Pension Action Center, a research group at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She estimates unclaimed pension benefits could total as much as $8 billion annually.

When I left a job at National Journal magazine in Washington in 1995, I was offered a choice between staying in the company pension plan or taking a $19,100 lump-sum payment. I opted for the pension, carefully filing away the paperwork I got from HR, which estimated I’d get $436 a month starting at age 65. That doesn’t sound like much, but it would total more than $100,000 if I lived 20 years after retirement.

National Journal had been owned by the Times Mirror media group when I worked there, but was sold in 1997. I figured the new owner’s HR department would still have the pension records. It didn’t and had no idea who did. Times Mirror was eventually acquired by the Tribune Co., which split into two companies in 2014. News reports at the time said Tribune had more than $90 million in unfunded pension liabilities. Oh dear.

I tried the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a federal agency that takes over pension plans if they go bankrupt. It’s also a repository for unclaimed benefits owed to people whose former employers have terminated their plans. The PBGC has an online database of some 35,200 people who are collectively owed $351.5 million. I wasn’t in the database—which was frustrating, but also good news, since it meant my pension plan hadn’t gone bust or shut down.

I then turned to the Pension Rights Center, a nonprofit that has counseling centers in 30 states to help people with retirement-benefits problems. Bad luck: Neither the District of Columbia, where I had worked, nor Virginia, where I lived at the time, are among the areas it serves. Next stop was the Department of Labor’s Employment Benefits Security Administration, which helps people locate pensions and 401(k) accounts. I filled out a request form on its website. A few weeks later, a representative left a message saying she was still searching.

In the meantime, though, I’d had a breakthrough: A former colleague remembered that another co-worker had opted to remain in the old pension plan back in 1997. I located him, and he told me he was now receiving monthly retirement benefits via fund management giant Vanguard. I called Vanguard, provided my Social Security number, and—bingo!

Later, I learned that my pension had been folded into a Times Mirror plan after the 1997 sale. Tribune, after acquiring Times Mirror, had kept that plan separate from its troubled pension holdings (what luck!) and hired Vanguard to administer it. A letter apprising me of all these changes was mailed to an address where I hadn’t lived for 17 years. Such situations are “not uncommon,” Emily Farrell, a Vanguard spokeswoman, told me, noting that plan participants “move, marry, change names, etc., and often don’t notify the plan sponsor.”

Tracking down an errant 401(k) can be even more challenging, according to John Turner, director of the Pension Policy Center, an advocacy group in Washington. The Labor Department says employers abandon some 1,650 401(k) plans every year. Over the past decade, that’s left in limbo more than $8 billion owed to people who left their accounts behind when they changed jobs. Even when plans remain active, people sometimes forget about their accounts or die without leaving records for heirs. The Labor Department can sometimes help locate missing

Number of 401(k) plans abandoned each year, according to the U.S. Labor

Department