Striking gold: rediscovering lost savings

A few years ago, as a bored student during my summer break, I reluctantly agreed to help my mother clear out some old paperwork. Paperwork that in my mind had been accumulating since the Stone Age.

It was a mammoth task. Piles of paperwork dating back to the 80s – goodness knows why it survived a house move. But little did I know that my hard efforts would lead to striking gold. I discovered my golden ticket. In big calligraphic scrawl the ticket I had found was in fact my lost Children’s Savings Bonds.

Golden ticket

I was vaguely aware that I had some sort of savings which had been gifted to me by my grandmother. My parents once mentioned it, but I thought they were referring to savings in my building society account.

And I know I’m not alone in my vague awareness. When we recently surveyed 1,346 Which? members, we found that some 10% thought they’d lost track of their Premium Bonds, and 8% their savings. Let’s be honest, sometimes these things can slip through the net.

Now that I’d found this bond, the question was – what now? Being the days before I worked at Which?, I took to Google for help.

I wasn’t sure that Google would have the answer I was looking for, especially as this battered old document looked like something from the last century. To make it all that more complicated it was also registered to an old address – an address I hadn’t lived at for 10 years.

But I shouldn’t have allowed my pessimism to triumph, after all the internet is a wonderful thing. A short search brought me to the National Savings & Investments (NS&I) website’s tracing a lost investment page. I could have also used mylostaccount.org.uk

Of course now you can read the Which? advice, which will give you all the information for tracking down your lost cash.

I filled out the NS&I’s tracing service request form and a fortnight later I had a letter confirming that I did indeed have a dormant investment. The bond had stopped earning interest, since I was no longer a child, and so I was asked to either cash it in or reinvest.

Thank you grandma

So thanks very much to my grandmother. Much to her delight, my Children’s Bond purchased my very first sofa 🙂

But there are a few lessons I’ve learned here. It really can pay to do a little bit of tidying up every now and again – thank you to my mother for hoarding paperwork. It’s also really worthwhile to keep track of your savings and change your address when you move – that goes for my parents too.

Featured Comment

alfa says:

20 April 2016

Your post has prompted me to look into my account especially as I can't see any interest ever added to it although it was a fairly pathetic attempt at saving and the balance was never that high. I found a 2010 article in thisismoney entitled 'How much has my £1 grown over 35 years. According to NS&I it had grown to the princely sum of £1.94 !!!

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Have you kept track of all your savings and investments? Have you ever found any lost savings before?