Dear Penny: How Do I Find Current and Past 401(k)s?

Dear Lost,

Start by directly contacting human resources at any company where you’ve contributed to a 401(k). If you aren’t sure whether or not you contributed, check W-2s from your tax records for retirement plan contributions in Box 12D. These HR contacts can let you know where your money is, including:

• If your account balance is more than $7,000, they’re required to keep it in the account, per the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022.
• If your account held between $1,000 and $7,000, they’re allowed to move it into an IRA. They should notify you when they do that, but reach out if you haven’t heard from them to get information about how to access the IRA.

Once you know where your money is, you can contact the plan administrator (the financial company that manages the account) to roll it over into another retirement account, so you can manage all of your savings in one place.

If these contacts don’t have the right information for you, you can search for old plans through public databases for free without entering credit card information:

• If your company registered with the National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits, you can find your account by entering your Social Security number.
• You can search for plans that have been terminated through the Department of Labor’s Abandoned Plan Search with just your name.

Other services exist to help you search different databases and rollover 401(k)s, but they tend to charge for the service. Yes, Beagle is a legitimate service: It’s rated 4.7 by customers on TrustPilot with more than 1,400 reviews and has a B- rating by the Better Business Bureau (though it hasn’t paid for accreditation). Capitalize is a similar service.

Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance® and author of YOU DON’T NEED A BUDGET. She writes Healthy Rich, a newsletter about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach and talk about money.