Tracking Down Your Long-Lost Pension Payments

If you are owed a pension, notify your former employer if you move, Bruce said. You also should make sure you get a statement from your previous employer about your entitlement and a summary plan description. Employers are required to send plan descriptions to employees, and you should keep yours on file. For one thing, you need to know what you have coming to determine whether your savings for retirement are on track. And if you have a copy of the summary plan description, even if it's old, you will have the accurate name of the plan and the name and address of its administrator.

Bruce said workers can forget the precise name of their pension plan -- for instance, if they worked for a subsidiary of a larger company. Or they may not remember whether it was the company or the union that administered the plan, she said. If you are in touch with former co-workers, they may be able to help you find information about the plan. Sometimes companies are hard to find because they have been acquired and have new names. And, in some cases, divisions may have been acquired by separate companies. There are Web sites (see box) that can help you trace a company's genealogy.

When it comes to proving entitlement, earnings records available from the Social Security Administration can help. "Companies lose records. They have mistakes in their records. We have cases where people come and say, 'I worked for the XYZ company,' and the company says, 'Yeah, but you only worked here seven years, and we had 10-year vesting,' " Bruce said. Vesting means the number of years required to be entitled to pension benefits. "Or companies will say, 'You never worked here at all,' or 'all those records were lost in the warehouse fire in '82.' "

And so now Vandeputte is making sure he has up-to-date information on his previous employer's pension.

In one recent case, the New England Pension Assistance Project used its sleuthing to turn up a pension for a former employee of Morton Thiokol. Morton Thiokol Inc. split into two companies, Morton International Inc. and Thiokol Corp., and Rohm and Haas Co. acquired Morton International in 1999. After 10 months of detective work, the center found the pension and used Social Security records to prove that the former employee was entitled to collect, said Jeanne Medeiros, legal coordinator for the New England center.

The payoff? More than $1,100 a month in pension benefits.

Have medical expenses taken an unanticipated bite out of your retirement savings? If you're willing to talk about it and have your story appear in a column, please e-mail me athamiltonm@washpost.com.