A HOMELESS man discovered a hidden savings account using a five-minute check which saved him from living on the streets.
James Smith was 22 and homeless when he found a lost account that had been opened by his mum when he was a child.
1
The Natwest children’s savings account, opened when James was 10, had £300 in it – the lifeline he needed to put a deposit down on a rented flat.
“My mum set it up for me when I was 10-years-old,” James told The Mirror.
“She had been paying around £10 a month in for a several years. When I found it, it had £300 in.”
Accounts can be lost for a number of reasons, including a change of address or people forgetting they ever opened them.
A new free-to-use service called Gretel can help people track down those lost bank accounts and claim their money back.
According to figures from the firm, which launched in April, around 19.6million people in the UK are missing out on dormant or unclaimed money.
More than £50billion is unclaimed in the UK, Gretel said, including £37billion in pensions, £5.3billion in lost investments and shares and £2.2billion in lost child trust funds.
How can I check if I’ve got a hidden bank account?
If you can remember your bank or building society, contact them directly in the first instance.
You can use the free Policydetective.co.uk site to check if the company has changed its name, and to check for its contact details.
If you can’t remember the details, or your bank or building society says it can’t help, you can use a free tracing service such as Gretel or My Lost Account.
If you use Gretel, you will need to register on the site and go through identity and anti-fraud checks.
After that you may need to provide some further information, such as legal documents or previous addresses.
Gretel will do the search straight away, and will alert you in the future if new additions to the database bring up any results.
It will also scan for lost pensions and investments, as well as bank accounts.
Meanwhile, there are over 70 providers signed up to My Lost Account.
That includes all major banks, all 43 UK building societies, and National Savings & Investments (NS&I) – including the old Post Office Savings Bank accounts.
You should get a response within three months.
As NS&I is included, this means you’ll find out if you’ve got any lost Premium Bonds too.
You could then use NS&I’s free online prize checker tool to see if you’ve won any Premium Bond prizes, which can be reclaimed from all the way back to June 1957.
We pay for your stories!
Do you have a story for The Sun Online Money team?
