Pension pot full of “forgotten” money amounts to 2.4 billion euros

Around 2.4 billion euros in forgotten pension money is lying untouched. This is because 450,000 ‘forgotten’ pension pots are waiting to be paid out to pensioners, De Telegraaf reports.

The “forgotten” pension pots are mostly accumulated profits that should be paid out, but whose owners cannot be found by the Dutch pension funds. Even though most of the outstanding pension payments are not particularly large amounts, usually less than 100 euros a year, some dusty pension pots may contain larger amounts. “Most of these benefits are indeed not very high. But there are also amounts of €15,000 per year. You would say that something like this is well worth picking up,” explains Ger Jaarsma, chairman of the Pension Federation.

Despite numerous efforts to track down pensioners who are unaware of their pension funds or have simply forgotten about them, the number of forgotten pension pots continues to grow. Because the number of retirees who are missing has risen from 370,000 to almost 375,000 within a year. “Many people have built up a pension somewhere in the past, and don’t even know it existed, “Rob Dingemans, manager of pension policy and administration at pension fund PME, told De Telegraaf.

In most cases, these are people who move abroad over time, such as migrant workers. “These people work here for a few years, build up a pension unnoticed, and leave. If no data is available from such people, the pension fund will be left with the money,” Jaarsma says.

But migrant workers are not the only ones making up the share of forgotten pension pots. Many Dutch people who emigrate at some point also carelessly leave their pension pots behind. In such cases, the Dutch pension funds have to track down the people concerned via the Register of Foreigners (RNI), which can provide information. This is because people who move abroad have to register in this database.