Lost 401(k)
Over the past few years, I’ve gotten sporatic mailings from a former employer, EarthWeb (now Dice.com, with the EarthWeb web sites now owned by an entirely different entity) concerning my 401(k) account. These came about once a year, at various points in the year, and didn’t follow a quarterly schedule. Apparently, they had lost my contact address, and was sending out mail to random addresses hoping for a hit.
Last week, I got an email from an HR person at Dice.com about my retirement account, basically saying that they didn’t have my address, and to please get back to them. She had found me through a Yahoo search after exhausting other means. I had been one of a dozen or so lost former employees who hadn’t sent Dice a forwarding address after moving.
So, I finally got my statements over the weekend and was surprised that there was more money in the account than I had vested when I left the company. This had all been in the heydey of the boom, and one reason I hadn’t made a real effort to get in touch with them was because I thought there’d be maybe $100 in the account after the bubble burst; anyway, I couldn’t really touch the money until retirement, so there wasn’t much urgency.
What happened was that these funds had been invested in whatever mutual funds I had chosen in 1997, but, at the end of 2000 when they couldn’t get in touch with me, it was all moved out of the mutual funds and put into a money market account, where it just sat accumulating interest. In the meantime, the market crashed, but my money was untouched. It was actually a good thing they had lost touch with me, because I might have put the money into, say, a NASDAQ index or something, if I had access to it. Instead, it’s actually up by about 30%.
I actually do have to move the money: there’s not enough money in the account for Dice.com to want to keep it around. The form to roll it into my current 401(k) is currently on its way, and the process should take about a week.