Forgotten Pension Funds
Thousands are due money sitting in old pension funds.
Having trouble making ends meet living on your retirement nest egg? You might be owed some pension money. A total of $133 million in retirement benefits haven't been claimed, the federal agency that insures private pension plans reports. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. said 32,000 people are owed money. Individual benefits range from $1 up to $611,028.
The average unclaimed benefit is about $4,950.
Although the vast majority of workers receive their full pensions, sometimes people lose track of benefits earned with former employers. People who may have lost track of a pension earned during their career and think they may be owed retirement benefits can conduct a search using PBGC's online directory
www.pbgc.gov/search. People can search by their last name, company name or state where the company was headquartered.
Over the past twelve years more than 22,000 people have found $137 million in missing pension benefits through PBGC’s Pension Search program. The states with the most missing pension participants and money to be claimed are: New York (6,885/$37.49 million), California (3,081/$7.38 million), New Jersey (2,209/$12.05 million) Texas (1,987/$6.86 million), Pennsylvania (1,944/$9.56 million), Illinois (1,629/$8.75 million) and Florida (1,629/$7.14 million).
The PBGC insures pensions for 44 million workers and retirees.
The Pension Search directory is regularly updated with the names of more missing people. The current list identifies some 6,600 companies, primarily in the airline, steel, transportation, machinery, retail trade, apparel and financial services industries that closed pension plans in which some former workers could not be found.
The online service is free and available 24 hours a day. For those without access to the Internet at home, many local public libraries, community colleges and senior centers make computers available to the public that can be used for searching the Pension Search directory.
The PBGC is a federal corporation created under Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. It currently guarantees payment of basic pension benefits earned by 44 million American workers and retirees participating in over 30,000 private-sector defined benefit pension plans. The agency receives no funds from general tax revenues.