Do you know where your retirement money is? Study finds thousands have forgotten pensions

Judy Shapiro, 74, admits she wasn’t thinking about retirement when she was beginning her career in the 1970s. However, she had been building a nest egg, which she nearly didn’t claim.

She was in her 20s and working on a contract with the CBC, making a kids’ TV show called What’s New. She belonged to a union, ACTRA, and contributed to its retirement savings plan for members. She only worked there for a few years before moving on, then left the country for four years.

“I was admittedly not really interested in monetary success or anything like that,” she told CBC’s Cost of Living.

The paperwork for her RRSP went into a box and she forgot about it for almost 40 years. About five years ago, she was looking through old files and found a form that said she had invested $8,000 in that RRSP while she was an ACTRA member.

She reached out to ACTRA and, after confirming her identity, she was told it was now worth more than $100,000.

“I just about fell off my chair, actually. I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

She converted that account to a Registered Retirement Income Fund (RRIF) that’s now managed by the ACTRA Fraternal Benefit Society. That translates into an extra $650 in her pocket every month.

Shapiro is not the only Canadian to lose track of retirement savings. Thousands of people may be missing out on unclaimed retirement money. Unfortunately, it’s harder than you might expect for pension plans to find people who may be owed a significant chunk of cash.

A December 2024 report by the National Institute on Ageing found that nearly 200,000 people with registered pension plans are considered missing in Ontario alone, adding up to about $3.6 billion in unclaimed money.

Who thinks about retirement at 20?

Sebastien Betermier, an associate professor of finance at McGill University in Montreal, says Shapiro’s case isn’t surprising.

“Who thinks about retirement at the age of 20? You’ve just come out of school. You have a degree. You have your first job, then your first big investment will typically be to buy a house,” he said.

“We’re always confronting short-term financial priorities, and so the pensions are oftentimes on the back burner.”

Add to this the fact that many Canadians change employers throughout their career, and may change addresses or phone numbers, making it harder for a pension plan to find you. Over time, it can also become increasingly difficult for a company to connect these funds with a missing member.

Eventually, they may just run out of time.

“One of the findings from Ontario is that a significant number of the missing members are over 100 years old,” said Doug Chandler, an actuary and associate fellow at the National Institute on Ageing and co-author of the study.

“So, obviously, those are people who are never going to be found except in the cemetery.”

If a pension plan administrator can’t find a missing member or that person’s beneficiary, the money sits unclaimed. A plan might buy an annuity from an insurance company, which takes on the job of monitoring the funds. Or the money might be redirected to an unclaimed property fund in some provinces.

Betermier noted that the foundations of Canada’s pension system were “built in an era where we had more stable employment and less turnover.” If you’ve worked with the same employer your entire career, you probably didn’t have to do a lot to keep track of your pension.

“We have, in my view today in the private sector, a system in Canada that is very fragmented, where you have a lot of mini-pensions with different employers. And a lot of the onus on the individual.”

Finding the missing members

Pension plans do try to contact people who have unclaimed pension funds, but it’s not always easy to do so.

For one, privacy laws mean that the funds can only say so much until a person replies to them to verify their identity. If a person’s contact information is out of date, it can be hard to find their latest info. 

Pension plan administrators like OP Trust, which runs the pension plan for provincial government workers in Ontario, may ask the Canada Revenue Agency to help.

The CRA will write a letter on behalf of the plan, advising someone that they may be able to claim a pension. But Jesusa Chow, a senior VP at OP Trust, says people today are just as likely to believe this is a scam.

“What I worry about is that there are members out there that don’t realize that they have this benefit that will help them in their retirement age and in their old age. And that is a shame,” she said.

Chow says OP Trust currently has about 1,400 members listed as missing; the average payment they’re eligible to receive — and are currently missing out on — is about $470 a month. That’s just the average, though; Chow says one missing member could be receiving $4,300 a month — if they find them.

Chandler says connecting forgotten pension funds with their owners likely isn’t a major priority for provincial and federal governments in Canada because, for the most part, the missing nest eggs aren’t very big per person.

“Compared to the size of the Canadian pension system, it’s not big. But in terms of total dollars and in terms of the impact on individuals, it can be big,” he said.

“There’s enough money at stake here that you’d think we could get the government’s attention. We are talking about billions of dollars of unpaid benefits, and billions of dollars of unpaid taxes.”

Ultimately, Shapiro says it’s worth putting in the time to keep track of where you’ve worked. And even if you haven’t dedicated your entire career to memory, it’s never too late to start looking.

“Think about where you’ve worked in the past and contact them, and find out whether you happen to have a pension … [or] if you’ve got money tucked away somewhere,” she said.