Over the course of a career, you will probably have multiple retirement accounts. You’ll probably open a 401(k) plan with each employer along with a personal IRA. It can be easy to lose track of those accounts over a career that lasts decades, especially for early-career jobs that may not last that long. While it is suggested that you be diligent with tracking your retirement accounts after you leave a job, it’s not uncommon for accounts to be forgotten about. If you do lose track of your retirement accounts, there are tools available to try to track them down. The Department of Labor’s Employee Benefit Security Administration can provide help over the phone as well as online (they have a searchable database of abandoned plans). Depending on the state you worked in, you may also want to see if that state has an unclaimed property division with a database similar to the federal government’s. Finally–as a last resort–you may want to reach out to your past employer where you set up your forgotten plan and see if they may have information regarding the custodian of your forgotten account. If you can reach the custodian, you should be able to get an idea regarding the location of the account. As stated earlier in this post, the best way to avoid all this is to keep track of your retirement accounts from the start. If you leave a job, be sure to either rollover your employer plan money into an IRA or you find a way to not forget the plan if you decide to keep it (this is a common option if you have worked for an employer for a long period and have a substantial amount saved in your employer plan). So, do you have any forgotten retirement accounts?