The forgotten fortunes that are waiting to be claimed
RIGHT NOW there are ten people in the UK sitting on a £1m lottery win that they have no idea about – including one lucky winner in Doncaster who has until July 20 to check their tickets and make a claim.
It’s hard to imagine how someone can be so blissfully unaware of a fortune with their name on it, but it’s far more common than you think. There are billions of pounds worth of cash lying forgotten everywhere from pensions to Child Trust Funds, so it’s worth checking whether any of it is yours.
An enormous chunk of this cash is sitting in forgotten pensions – an estimated £2.1bn worth. Because we hold them for decades, there’s a decent chance we move jobs and houses over the years, and if we don’t update our details, it’s easy to lose track. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to track them down.
With workplace pensions, it’s much easier if you have the name of the employer or the scheme, plus the dates you worked there. If you’ve lost all your paperwork, it might be worth talking to old colleagues to see whether they have any information. Once you have a phone number or address for the employer, you can get in touch and ask for contact details of the pension administrator or provider.
For personal pensions, try to dig out any old paperwork to give you an idea of where your money is held. If you can’t find a pension statement or certificate, an old bank statement might show where you were making regular payments.
If you can’t find any paperwork, or track your old employer down, your next port of call should be the Government’s Pension Tracing Service (https:// www.gov.uk/find-pensioncontact-details). It will supply contact details of companies you have a pension with, so you can call and ask them to unearth your forgotten cash.
It’s also worth checking for any lost savings accounts. Since 2011,
£1.35bn has been identified as being left dormant in forgotten accounts, and that’s just counting the ones that have been untouched for at least 15 years.
When you’re hunting for savings, it helps if you can remember the bank you saved with, because if you get in touch and provide them with proof of your identity, they should be able to reunite you with your money.
If you’re not sure where your accounts are, it’s a matter of contacting any banks you think you might have an account with in order to check. This is made much easier with the free My Lost Account service (My Lost Account).
You just indicate which institutions you want to search – out of more than 30 banks, 43 building societies and National
Savings & Investments. It’ll take up to 90 days for them to get back to you with any details, and then you can contact them direct.
The Government thinks there’s also around £1.4bn left in forgotten investments. If you know the company you held investments with, you can contact them, and they’ll help you find your money. If you don’t have any paperwork, it’s worth trying My Lost Account. Alternatively, you can use the Unclaimed Assets Register https://www.uar.co.uk/. This service, run by Experian, does come with a fee, but it lets you search the records of around 75 different providers.
One type of investment that runs a particularly high risk of having been forgotten is the Child Trust Fund. If your child qualified (they’d need to have been born between September 1, 2002 and January 2, 2011) and you didn’t get round to saving or investing the free money the Government gave you, the taxman would have put it into an investment for you.
Of the 6.3 million accounts opened, 1.8 million of them were opened by HMRC so there’s a reasonable chance that the parents never knew where the money went. Figures out this week showed that in the first seven months after CTFs started maturing, almost as many were left unclaimed as were withdrawn. That’s £374m left languishing.
You can track down a CTF through the Government website – as long as you have parental responsibility for the child. You need to sign into the Government Gateway, or sign up for an account. Then you can fill out a form with your child’s details, and they’ll tell you where the CTF is held.
Once you’ve found your CTF, you should seriously consider transferring the money to a Junior ISA. Cash JISAs tend to offer higher interest rates, while investment JISAs may have wider investment choices and lower charges.
If you’re very lucky, alongside any forgotten accounts, there may even be a life-changing prize waiting for you. If you hold Premium Bonds, you can enter your bond number on the NS&I website to see if you have any forgotten prizes.
If you don’t have your bond number, you’ll need to get in touch with NS&I, prove your identity, and ask to be reunited with your bonds. The best way to avoid missing any prizes in future is to have them paid directly into your bank account.
Meanwhile, you can check for unclaimed lottery prizes on the National Lottery website (https://www.national-lottery. co.uk/results/unclaimed-prizes), although of course you’ll need to track down your old tickets first. There’s a good chance that lottery fans in Doncaster are turning the house upside down in search of their golden ticket as we speak.