Tracing a life insurance policy
If you are trying to find out if you, a relative or friend has a life insurance policy, but you do not have the policy document and do not know the name of the insurance company that issued it:
- check your own, or the other person's, bank account / credit card statements for evidence of payments to an insurer
- use an unclaimed assets tracing service
If you have a life insurance policy and you have the policy document but you cannot contact the insurer, the company that issued your policy may have changed its name. Our handy Keeping Track of your Pension page can also help you find missing life insurance policies.
Tracing your pensions
To find if you have any forgotten pension pots, you could do the following:
Find your provider
Start with looking through old policy documents and bank statements, there should be some information about your provider. Most providers should have their contact details on their communications and websites.
If another provider has acquired the one you purchased your pension from, you can search on our Keep Track of your Pension page to find the relevant contact details for the provider now responsible for your policy.
You could make use of the Money Advice Service’s free template letter to request your policy’s information from the provider.
If you don’t know your provider
If you have a workplace pension with a previous employer, you could contact them for your scheme or provider’s details. Alternatively, you could use the Government’s free Pension Tracing Service. Please note this service could only inform you of the name and contact details of the provider of your employer’s scheme. It will not tell you whether you have a pension there, nor your pension policy’s details or its worth.
Tracing your Child Trust Funds
The Government introduced the Child Trust Funds (CTF) in 2005 with children born after 1 September 2002 eligible. They had the aim of ensuring every child has savings at the age of 18, helping children get into the habit of saving while teaching them the benefits of saving and helping them understand personal finance. The guardians or parents of eligible children were given cash vouchers. These could only be deposited into a tax-free Child Trust Fund account, available in stakeholder, share or savings account. Up to £4,368 can now be put into the account per year until the child’s 18 birthday. In 2020-2021, the limit will increase to £9,000.
The first wave of CTFs, valued £700m in total, mature in August 2020. A lot of eligible CTF holders are still unaware of their entitlement or have lost connection with these accounts with 700,000 CTFs estimated to be dormant. Many of these accounts were opened by the HMRC because the guardian/parents did not do so. If you think you or your child might have a lost CTF, you could find out where your CTF account is by contacting HMRC.
New regulations will now allow mature accounts to be transferred to an ISA without receiving holder’s instructions or taking up their ISA allowance, which might provide better rates than CTF accounts. Mature accounts will also maintain CTF tax advantage until their owners are found to provide instruction. You could also consider transferring your CTF into a Junior ISA before it matures.