'These tips will ensure you never lose track of your pension pot'

Unfortunately, the inaction that worked in your favour when it helped you build a pot, starts to work against you when you move on. Over time, you build a number of pensions and lose track of how much you have, and where it is. If you move house or change your contact details and don’t let them know, the pension provider will lose track of you too.

As a result, there are some significant sums sitting, gathering dust. Customers using AJ Bell’s pension finding tool have tracked down accounts worth an average of £18,500, while some have used the service to find and combine pots worth over £1 million.

It means it’s worth spending some time reconnecting with your pensions. Start with a list of everywhere you have worked and when. Then check your paperwork to see if you have any details of where the pensions are held. It can help to speak to old colleagues too, and see whether they’ve kept their paperwork. Armed with this, you can use the government pension tracing service or a pensions tracing tool to give you the details you need to find your pensions.

Once you’ve got a picture of your pension savings, you can decide if you need to start contributing more, as well as working out whether you might be better off switching to an account with lower costs, better service or investment choice, or a combination of all three. Combining pensions isn’t necessarily the right move for everyone. Some older-style pensions can have valuable guarantees attached that will be lost on transfer, so checking whether this is the case is also crucial.

Tracing lost pensions is a great start, but there’s no need to stop there, because there could be any number of other savings and investments with your name on them, just waiting to be found. The first step is always to check what paperwork you have, and to consider any accounts you have any memory of at all. If you draw a blank, you can use the My Lost Account service to track down any savings. You just need to complete a profile then fill out the search form. After 90 days you should have heard from everyone you hold accounts with, and you can then contact them to be reunited with your money.

You may have won big on Premium Bonds. It’s unlikely, but it’s worth checking, because if you haven’t signed up to have winnings paid into your account or used to buy more bonds, you’ll need to claim them, and there’s an impressive £128 million waiting to be claimed. If you have your bond numbers, you can plug them into the NS&I website. Otherwise, you can use its tracing service or My Lost Account.

You may also have a child or young adult in your life who qualified for a Child Trust Fund – if they were born between September 2002 and January 2011. It’s quite straightforward for the parents of a child under the age of 18 – or the adult themselves if they’ve reached the age of 18 – to track it down. You need to sign into the government gateway, then complete a form, and they’ll let you know where your money is. You can then get in touch with the provider to claim the money.

You could also try a newer search company called Gretel. It will use your credit report to identify your old addresses, and then search for matches. It’ll need you to add any previous names and any other addresses, and then every 14 days it will look for old accounts – including investments, shares and life insurance as well as bank accounts. However, it only searches with the organisations that are signed up, so it’s not as comprehensive as the official routes and is probably worth using alongside My Lost Account.

Once you’ve found any extra money, it can make sense to close old and uncompetitive accounts, and move your cash somewhere more rewarding. If you have a number of different savings accounts or investments, it can save a great deal of faff if you bring them together in one place. If you’re prone to losing things, it also makes it much easier to keep track of.

However, if you’re consolidating savings, don’t forget that only the first £120,000 with each institution is completely protected if something happens to the bank, so if you are lucky enough to have more savings than this, you will need to spread it around.

All of this tracking and tracing will take a bit of time, and you’ll need to be prepared to jump through a few hoops when you’re being reunited with your money. However, if it helps you find thousands of pounds, it could be the best-paid few hours you ever spend. It’s certainly going to be more rewarding than the hours you spend searching fruitlessly for things you could have sworn you had in your hand five minutes ago.

Steps ahead of the Budget

In the build-up to this Budget, we haven’t been hit with quite the same storm of speculation as the last couple of years, but still new AJ Bell research found that only 23% of people aren’t worried about what the Budget may hold in store. We asked people what they were planning to do to protect themselves from possible tax attacks, and some highly sensible steps made it to the top of the list.

Some 22% of people say they have put money into an ISA – or will do so - ahead of the Budget, to protect themselves from tax and secure their allowances. Meanwhile, 10% of people mentioned extra pension contributions, so they can take advantage of the system as it stands.

However, there was another option that came up a lot that needs very careful consideration, with 10% of people aged 50-64 saying they will take a tax-free lump sum from their pension before the Budget. If this is part of a long-term plan, that leaves you with all the retirement income you need, then this is nothing to worry about. However, if you’re taking it purely because of worries about what might lie in the Budget, without considering your wider finances, you could be doing immeasurable damage to your retirement income.