How did we find our old pensions?

The question behind the question

A friend talked about retirement. My immediate problem was embarrassingly basic: I did not know how many pensions I had, who held them or what they were worth.

There was no sensible retirement calculation to do until we rebuilt the raw material. So the first task was not clever modelling. It was detective work.

What we first believed

I assumed old pensions would be easy to find because employers and providers must have records. That was only partly true. Company names change. Providers merge. Old addresses no longer match. Some employers had no pension for us; others might have done, but the answer was not sitting in one convenient place.

What we actually did

We trawled old CVs, payslips, email, HMRC employment history, address history and name changes. We listed each employer rather than starting with pension providers. Then we contacted schemes, used tracing routes and recorded every response — including “no pension found” and “still waiting”. Then we did the same for Karen.

That distinction mattered. A clean list of confirmed pensions is not the same thing as proof that the search is complete.

The decision we made

We simplified the pensions we had confirmed where that genuinely made administration easier, while leaving schemes alone when their benefits or structure needed separate treatment. We did not treat consolidation as the objective. Understanding what we owned was the objective.

Our pension picture is now much cleaner: three known pensions instead of the confusing collection of old employers, providers and paperwork we started with.

What changed afterwards

Finding the pots did not make retirement suddenly obvious. If anything, it gave us a better class of problem: what do these balances and future benefits actually mean as an income over decades? That is what pushed us towards the spreadsheets.