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A mum who found a missing savings pot worth more than £48,000 has issued a warning to others.

PR director Karin Ridgers said she had no idea how much money she had accrued in workplace pensions over the years.

She has managed to trace a pension pot worth £48,274 from when she worked at UBS for ten years – and is in the process of finding the details of a second pension scheme. Karin believed she had another pension pot from Lloyds bank, but did not realise she was too young at the time to contribute to their workplace pension scheme.

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Karin, who is mum to 17-year-old son Callum, told The Mirror: “I worked at three banks after leaving school and don’t really know what’s what pension wise. It is something I have been meaning to do for ages – years in fact. When I set my business up, I had a chat with a financial advisor, and he said don’t worry about looking into pensions yet… that was nearly 18 years ago. I wish I had just done it at the time now, hindsight is a great thing.

“I couldn’t remember exactly what was what, including the years I started and left my jobs. They sent me some information and I just kept it in a box in my office. I couldn’t even tell you anything about my pensions.”

Karin said she has not yet looked at what options she has available next, and will seek advice on how best to move forward with her pension schemes. She is also waiting for an update on how much she has saved in her final missing pot.

She added: “The question is where does that leave me now? I want to know more about my options and how I can best support my retirement given I’m already working full time running my own business. I am worried I will have to find a huge amount of money, now I am 52 years old, to have a reasonable pension.”

It seems like Karim isn’t alone as around three million pension pots worth £26.6billion are lost or forgotten in the UK. This Sunday (October 29) is National Pensions Tracing Day, which encourages people to check whether they have savings they don't know about.

If you’ve had more than one job throughout your working life – the average Brit apparently goes through 12 – it’s very likely you’ve contributed to more than one pension pot. An industry-wide Pension Attention campaign recently found almost half (49.5%) of adults aged 30-55 years old did not think they'd be able to retire earlier than planned. Of this, 36% were men and 63% were women.

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A further 67.5% of adults said they are going to have to work for longer before they can retire than they first thought.

How to track down lost pensions

Pensions can become lost for several reasons including if you’ve moved address, lost paperwork, or if the company has been taken over or rebranded. If you're not sure where to start, the Government has a free Pension Tracing Service tool to track down lost pensions.

This is a free service which searches a database of more than 200,000 workplace and personal pension schemes. But the Pension Tracing Service will only tell you the contact details of a provider – not the amount you could have in a pension.

You'll need to contact the pension administrator yourself to find out if you have any funds with them. Alternatively, you can contact your employer and they should be able to provide you with the right details. Pension Wise is a Government service that offers free pension guidance and advice.

Hetty Hughes, Manager, Long Term Savings Policy at the Association of British Insurers (ABI) said: “Write a list of all the jobs you’ve had and check to see if you have any old paperwork which might have the name of your pension scheme or details of the scheme's administrator or provider.

“This will give you a good starting point. If you can’t find the paperwork, previous employers, if they are still around, should also be able to tell you where your contributions were paid while you worked there. If you’re still struggling to make progress, you can contact the Pension Tracing Service, a free and impartial government service to find the contact details you need.”

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