Yahoo Finance One in eight in UK lose track of workplace pensions
One in eight Brits have admitted to not knowing how many old workplace pension pots they have, according to a new poll.
Some 13% of respondents surveyed by investment platform Interactive Investor said the number of workplace pensions they had was a mystery.
“The mystery of missing pensions is one you definitely want to solve as over the years,” said Becky O’Connor, head of pensions and savings at Interactive Investor, said. “Investment growth – even for pots you haven’t been contributing to – can add up to thousands of pounds. That is money few of us can afford to ignore in retirement.”
O’Connor said the problem was likely to get worse in the coming years due to auto-enrolment, which requires employers to automatically open pensions for staff, and an increasingly mobile workforce.
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The finding underscores the need for the Pensions Dashboard, a government initiative that has been subject to a number of delays. The dashboard will allow people all to see all of their pensions in one place. The rollout of the dashboard will now be delayed until at least 2023, the Times reported this week.
Interactive Investor said people who had lost track of retirement savings should contact their old employers for details or use the government’s pension contact service to locate lost pots.
Among those who did know how many workplace pensions they had, the average held was two to four, according to the poll. 41% of respondents had this number of old schemes.
Interactive Investor’s survey was conducted in mid-November 2020 on the interactive investor platform and received 1,360 responses. The average age of those surveyed was 55.
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