Martin Lewis says boost pension by as much as £180,000 with two checks

Money expert Martin Lewis is urging people to check if they have a pension worth as much as £40,000 - and in one case, a staggering £180,000 - that they don’t realise they’re owed.

The financial guru issued a new episode of The Martin Lewis Podcast on Thursday, June 26 on BBC Sounds, Spotify and Apple Music in which he urged his listeners to check if they have an old pension that could be worth tens of thousands of pounds - as there are as many as three million ‘lost pensions’ out there just waiting to be reclaimed.

Martin Lewis said: “There cannot be many more potentially profitable uses of your time than searching for a lost pension. Especially for people who have worked for lots of different firms over many years.

“More than 3 million pensions are thought to have gone astray, with an average in them of £9,500 each though some can be bigger, so it can be a very good use of your time to try to find them.”

Martin then gave an example of a follower who recently tried Martin’s pension tip - and is set to get more than £40,000 out of it.

He added: “Let me just give you some inspiration to start with.

“Vicky emailed me: ‘love your site and TikTok and often use your tips, I decided to trace my pensions, they have come back to me and said they have found one from the 1990s which I had only paid a very small amount into for about five years as I recall.

“This pension is gonna pay me around £160 a month for the rest of my life. If I manage to get to 75, that’s a lot of money’.”

Martin continued: “I’ve estimated that to be about £40,000 to her if she does live to a typical life expectancy. Which is why it’s worth many people checking they haven’t lost a pension.

“And even if you only put a few quid in it, if it was in a good investment with the compounding of the growth over the years it can be worth a lot more than you thought.”

Martin added that some people have found even bigger amounts. He said: “Let me be plain, there are two main methods to do this but this is potentially enormous amounts of money.

“We’re generally talking in the five figures, I had people who found money in the substantial six figures - I had someone who got about £180,000 back.”

Martin added that it’s easy to lose track of a workplace pension if you move jobs, or their pension provider changes.

He said the first way to do this, is make a list of all your former employers and pension schemes. Then, contact the HR departments to see if they can help you find the details of the workplace pensions.

If you can’t do that, use the gov.uk pension tracing tool, which has the details of over 200,000 different schemes and give you the contact details of the providers.