Finding Lost Retirement Plan Money

One of our financial planners recently had a couple of clients share with him a letter from the Social Security Administration about previous employer retirement funds that they hadn’t claimed. We were mystified about this letter coming from the SSA. The clients were going to have to contact the previous employer’s retirement plan administrator to claim the misplaced funds. In one case the company no longer existed, causing even more challenges.

Shortly after these conversations with clients, Kiplinger published the article “How to Find a Lost 401(k),” which explored this topic and explained the new government program to help people find these lost dollars.

At the end of 2024 the Department of Labor formed a database to help people recover unclaimed retirement benefits. I went to the Lost and Found Database at https://lostandfound.dol.gov/ to test it.

• The login and verification process are through LOGIN.GOV, which is painful.
• The website struggled to verify and accept pictures of my driver license, but before exceeding the allowed number of tries I finally got in.
• Once I was logged in to the site, it was relatively easy to navigate, and I found that I had unclaimed retirement plan funds from 1999. The amount of money wasn’t life-changing, but it was enough to spend some time trying to recover it. The company and retirement plan administrator no longer exist.
• This led to several emails and phone calls with no success. PACO as a plan administrator came up. PACO, which is now part of The TPA Experts, answered the phone and their team was a great help. By going to Form 5500 Search we were able to see the plan’s final 5500 in 2017 and that there were no funds remaining in the plan. I was told that most likely the transfer of these funds to me was never reported. I would have to look at my IRA statements from 1997, 1998 or 1999 to see if the transfer occurred. I couldn’t find that history and accepted that those funds were received and put into my IRA decades ago. The Form 5500 site shows 5500s filed since Jan. 1, 2010.

Additionally, The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has a search function: Find unclaimed retirement benefits. It showed no matches found for my last name and the last four digits of my Social Security number. This confirmation provided greater certainty that the funds had been distributed properly to me and just not reported back in 1999.

With a stated 29 million lost 401(k) accounts worth almost $1.65 trillion, I encourage you to read the Kiplinger article and search the databases to make sure you don’t leave any money behind in 2025.