How To Find Out If I Have Money In 401k

In the hurried days of a big move to a new task, there's one valuable item workers are neglecting to pack: the money their erstwhile employer invested for them in a 401(k).

In that location's a lot of lost retirement savings without its rightful owners. Exactly how much is unknown — there is no one comprehensive national database on 401(k) or other lost retirement accounts. But PenChecks Trust, a California-based firm that helps companies locate old employee-owed retirement benefits, paid out $35 million to more than 15,000 missing participants in 2017 alone, says company vice president Spiro Preovolos. And Preovolos estimates that nationally the amount of lost retirement funds is "well into the billions of dollars."

If you think some of that lost cash may be yours, here's what to do:

Contact your onetime employers

Go dorsum to your one-time employers with your Social Security number and the time you were employed. Better all the same, locate an onetime statement from your 401(k) plan with them. With that information, the human resources department tin help reunite you with your retirement savings.

It seems an obvious place to start, but many people don't go that far. "A majority of the people [who lose track of 401(thousand) plans] are on the younger side. … They aren't thinking about retirement, or may not fifty-fifty know or think" they had a 401(k) with the company, Preovolos says.

And the number of people who lose track of their 401(k) is "going to increase significantly in the next 10 or 20 years," says Terry Dunne, a director at Millennium Trust, an Illinois-based fiscal services company that provides custody services to private accounts. That'south thank you to the Alimony Protection Act of 2006, which encourages companies to automatically enroll workers in 401(m)due south or other employer-sponsored retirement plans, Dunne says.

One more potential factor: The rate of early career task-hopping is steadily increasing. A 2016 LinkedIn assay found members who graduated betwixt 2006 and 2010 averaged two.9 jobs their first five years employed, compared to i.half dozen jobs of workers who graduated betwixt 1986 and 1990.

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Check lost retirement benefits databases

If you don't have any luck finding your 401(k) with your former employer — perhaps your employer has since gone out of business or was purchased past some other company — there are a few more places to cheque.

If your old company was sold, contact the man resources department of the visitor'south new owner. Also try the National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits, a free website founded more than than two decades ago by PenChecks Trust to help locate plan participants who have dropped off the radar.

Even if your visitor no longer exists, your money still does. Check the abandoned plan database maintained past U.South. Department of Labor to runway down the current trustee of your cash. If the retirement benefits were through a traditional alimony programme for a company that no longer exists, try the unclaimed pensions database of the U.S. Alimony Guaranty Corp.

» How much should I salvage for retirement?A step-past-step guide

Wait at state unclaimed money websites

While y'all're looking for your retirement money, you might every bit well check for whatever other lost dough. When Florida nurse Mary Pitman ran a random search on Missingmoney.com, a database maintained by the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, she constitute $2,500 in stocks left behind when her father died.

"I became a believer real quick," says Pitman, who wrote "The Fiddling Book of Missing Coin" to help others detect lost cash. The unclaimed property administrators group also maintains unclaimed.org, which points users to databases of missing greenbacks turned over to private state treasuries.

Run a search based on states where you one time lived or worked to discover money owed to you. Virtually missing 401(1000) plans wouldn't be turned over to a state, officials say, but vested visitor stocks, forgotten depository financial institution accounts, uncashed paychecks or utility deposits are commonly turned over to state treasuries. In 2015 alone, $7.8 billion in missing money was turned over to states, according to the NAUPA.

Establish it? Practice the 401(one thousand) rollover

In one case you've found your 401(chiliad), what practice you do with it?

"The single all-time thing you can practice to non lose your retirement account is to roll it over to your new employer's 401(k) programme," Pitman says. Then your savings — old and new — volition be in i place.

But a 401(k) might come up with limited investment options or higher fees. To avoid these, you lot might consider rolling the cash to a traditional or Roth IRA. A traditional IRA would keep your money tax-deferred; a Roth IRA would require you to pay taxes on the rolled-over corporeality, simply with no taxes taken out when you withdraw it in retirement.

And the adjacent time you switch jobs, don't forget to pack your 401(k) with you. "Information technology's your money — the longer you wait between jobs, the more difficult and murky information technology becomes finding information technology," Preovolos says.

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Kevin Voigt is a writer at NerdWallet. Email: kevin@nerdwallet.com.

The article How to Notice Lost 401(k) Cash (and Other Unclaimed Money) originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/retirement/2018/02/24/how-to-find-lost-401k-cash-and-other-unclaimed-money/110406836/

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