Brian Hartstein:

Hello everyone. I’m Brian Hartstein, Director of Corporate Development with Bayntree Wealth Advisors, and I have Jon Gengle here, one of our advisors on our staff and is part of our core team dedicated to working with our 401K plans and 401k plan participants. So, today we’d like to jump into our February 401k educational topic, which as you can see, is what happens to an old 401k account? How do I locate mine?

Brian Hartstein:

You would be surprised how many times when we’re working with 401K plans and 401K plan participants, that people ask us questions in regards to an old 401k account that they may have with a previous employer. Variety of times they’re saying, “Hey, I haven’t seen the account in five or 10 years, or I haven’t seen a statement, I don’t know where to go to find it. How would I go about getting my hands on that data so perhaps I can consolidate my accounts, or at least put them in an environment where I can do some planning that’s more comprehensive based on what else I’m doing with all of our other accounts and financial planning?”

Brian Hartstein:

John works extensively with participants specifically in that area. So, we thought it’d be a great topic to tackle for February and go over some of those options. So again, what happens to my 401k with an old company, haven’t seen a variety of years. So, let’s just kind of walk through the different options and see what’s available to you as a resource and a tool which you can utilize to hopefully get your hands around those accounts. Obviously, you can always call us, but we’d also like to give people enough education and tools to utilize, that if they want to go do that type of detective work on their own again.

Jon Gengle:

All right, so let’s get through these options. So, first and foremost may be the most obvious option for you to find out what happens to an old 401k is contact your old employer. So, that would be usually an HR person if you have that contact, even if you don’t have a specific contact at the old employer, I’m sure you knew who you used to work for. Go ahead and call their number and see if somebody can direct you to the right party to get you more information about where that plan is currently, and the best contact there so you can go through and do some of that discovery and find out what happened to that old account.

Brian Hartstein:

Yeah, to springboard off of that, obviously seems like a bright idea to go look at your last statement. It might be five or 10 years old, but that last statement should have information about who the plan administrator possibly is, or who the investment platform is where then you could go contact them, or if you need our help, we can help you contact them to find out exactly where your account is now, what the value is and what are your planning options going forward from there.

Jon Gengle:

All right, so moving forward, if none of those options work, those first two, there is a little bit more digging that you can do and that would be doing a search for unclaimed retirement benefits on the national registry of unclaimed retirement benefits. So, this is through the Department of Labor. You can search for pretty much every plan that’s available in the employer sponsored plan to try and identify again, where are those funds held? Who’s holding custody of the old account?

Brian Hartstein:

Yes. And also at the Department of Labor, you can go on their website and look for what we call a Form 5500. Now, what is a Form 5500? Well, most pension plans have to file annual tax forms and that is a 5500, which outlines everything that’s gone on inside the plan. And those forms become public record and become public data, after a certain point. So, if you went on the Department of Labor’s website and you went to the 5500 section and typed in your old employers company name, the plans should come up with the latest set of forms that they filed, which has become public data. And that might give you the ability to look and see where the plan is now. And again, sometimes people find that they send it to us, we go through that for them and say, “Here’s what we found out, here’s where we think your plan is.”

Jon Gengle:

Yeah. If you have any questions on what that process looks like, can be a little bit more complicated than just contacting your old employer, we obviously have those resources, we know how to navigate that system and can certainly assist you in tracking that old plan down. So lastly here, sometimes companies merge. So in those situations, what happens to the plan? Is it moved to a new TPA? Is there a new custodian involved as well? So, identifying a corporate merger of your old company, if you know that a larger company bought out the company you previously worked for, understanding that process and that timeline can help us also identify where an old 401k may be situated currently.

Brian Hartstein:

Yes. Hopefully this will give you some starting point. We will find those old 401k accounts because we cannot stress enough how important it is to make sure that you’ve got current and updated data on those accounts and then understand your planning options in terms of how you might use the consolidation, or you might do some different planning, just to make sure that the account that you have is feeding into your whole financial planning picture. And that’s one of the things that we do here. Obviously, there is no cost for utilizing our services, whether it’s to determine risk tolerance, it’s to help with financial planning, to optimize your 401k account. We’re here to help you.

Brian Hartstein:

So again, reach out to us via phone, reach out to us via email, stop at our office if you’re local, and we’re certainly happy to have that conversation and find out how we can help you make your plan more efficient, make your account more efficient, and hopefully trued up to your financial planning success. So thanks, looking forward to talking with you again next month.

Jon Gengle:

Thank you. See you soon.

Brian Hartstein:

Take care.