Introduction

If you have worked in more than one country, you almost certainly have a retirement account somewhere that you have not looked at in years. This article is about what that silence costs.

We will walk through the three checks we run on every orphaned account, and explain the situations where the correct advice is to leave it exactly where it is.

An orphaned pension is a retirement account you stopped contributing to when you changed country, and stopped thinking about roughly six months later. It is still invested. It is rarely invested well.

The pattern is consistent: a default fund chosen for a workforce you are no longer part of, a fee structure set when the balance was small, and a beneficiary nomination naming someone from a previous chapter of your life.

The three checks

• Cost: what is the total annual charge, including platform, fund and any legacy policy fee? Above 1.5 per cent on a dormant account is a flag.
• Allocation: is it still in a lifecycle or default fund targeting a retirement date you no longer expect to use?
• Documentation: is the beneficiary nomination current, and does the provider have an address that reaches you?

Consolidation is not automatically the answer

Moving everything into one place is tidy, and tidiness sells. But some legacy schemes carry guarantees, protected retirement ages or tax treatment that a transfer destroys permanently.

The correct sequence is trace, value, then assess what you would be giving up. Only after that does the transfer question become answerable.

We have advised clients to leave a scheme exactly where it was, because the guarantee inside it was worth more than the fee saving.Naji Haddad, Legacy Planning

Practical first step

List every employer you have had, in every country, and mark the ones where a retirement contribution was made on your behalf. That list is usually longer than people expect, and it is enough to start the tracing process.