Unclaimed Retirement Benefits

Hey welcome to this segment on unclaimed retirement benefits. The first thing I’d like to explain is what is an unclaimed retirement benefit? That could be an old 401K. That could be an old Pension that you’ve earned over your lifetime, but either forgot about or life happened and maybe your beneficiaries didn’t even know that you had earned that. I want to put up a screen here of some pretty shocking statistics. The average worker in America right now will have 12.7 jobs over their lifetime. It’s interesting that half of those jobs are earned between ages 18-24. But in May of 2023 there was 29.2M lost retirement accounts. They had total assets in those accounts of $1.65T. There were 72K eligible Americans for Pensions that are currently not gathering those payments. Pretty shocking, I think. You know and you say how could that happen? Well let me just give you an example of my wife and I. You know my wife and I were both teachers. I taught high school math, personal finance, calculus, algebra 2 for 17 years. My wife taught special ed, you know for 16 years. And through those years of service we earned pensions and we also opened up some 403Bs and 457s. Now since we’ve retired, you know our pension equation is such that you can’t actually start our personal pensions here until we get to the age 60. And so that means we might have 20 years of life happening before we can ever turn those on. And if you’re not organized or you don’t let your beneficiaries know what you’ve earned. You could see how easily those might get lost or forgotten about. You know when I explained to my wife our financial situation and try to teach her some things, she’ll look at the income plan or all of the different planning and resources that we have here at Centennial and she’ll just be okay, that’s enough. I’m not really interested. Are we going to be able to retire? I hope so, yeah. But what goes into that retirement plan are these accounts. And you can see how easily they could either be lost or forgotten or life happens and you want to know what to do and how to claim them. Okay, so here’s some strategies. The first thing is contact your old employer. Okay, get to the HR and just say hey, do we have any kind of statements, paystubs, old literature on these accounts? Whether it’s a 403B or a 457 or a 401K and just see if you can get a contact number that you can then reach out and then see what kind of benefits might still be lost there. The next thing is that you can just have your own documents. We have clients come in all of the time and they’ll have a box of stuff. And they’ll just be like okay, here’s my stuff. But I need to find some of these old things. I don’t know where to look. And even if I found it, I’m not even sure what I’m looking at. And then I wouldn’t know what to do afterwards. And so we say okay, no problem. Let’s just start looking through all of those old statements and trying to go down memory lane there of what employment did you have? You know and what might you have earned, but is just sitting there because in the transition of jobs, there’s a lot that’s going on. Life can happen fast and these are those things that can be forgotten about. Now there’s some really helpful online tools. And so if you’re sitting there wondering I wonder if I have an old Pension or I wonder if you know my old 401K or 403B, how might I find that? If you look at this graphic here on the screen, you’ll notice there’s two really helpful websites to give you a start. There’s many out there, but the National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation are two websites that you might start that search. Okay, it’s a national registry that will have that information that you might be able to uncover some old assets that you didn’t even know that you had. Or maybe you’re of age now and you can turn on those benefits similar to my Pension. Once I get 60, if I’m still kicking I’m going to be turning that on because that’s going to be my best option forward. What happens if your company went out of business, okay? Well this is where those statements and contacting your employer and contacting the new company that might have bought it could be very helpful. And then finally, work with a Financial Advisor. You know we do this stuff all of the time. We know the questions to ask and we know what we’re looking at when we’re look at those statements. So if you have a trusted Financial Advisor, I would highly suggest put it on their lap. Work together as a team to try and uncover these hard earned benefits. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that added value to your life.