“There's a pension somewhere in your name that you haven't looked at in five years.”

That's a sentence Paddy finds himself saying in client meetings more often than you'd expect. Across a 25-year career, the typical Irish professional works for three or four different employers and the result, by the time someone reaches their mid-fifties, is often €100,000 to €500,000 spread across multiple dormant pensions that haven't been reviewed in years.

In this episode, Paddy walks through what he calls the forgotten pension problem — the structural feature of Irish pension administration that means employer-funded pensions don't follow you when you change jobs. He explains the 2-year vesting rule, what it means to be a “deferred member” of a scheme, and the four decisions every senior professional faces when leaving a role with a pension: leave it where it is, transfer to your new employer's scheme, transfer to a Personal Retirement Bond, or transfer to a PRSA.

He also covers two structural changes that took effect at the start of 2026. The first is auto-enrolment “My Future Fund”, which launched on 1 January 2026 and now automatically enrolls workers earning over €20,000 who aren't already in a workplace pension. The second is a new restriction: transfers from group occupational schemes to personal pension structures (PRSA or PRB) are now only permitted before Normal Retirement Age, a planning point for anyone approaching a late-career exit.

The episode closes with the annual pension audit: three questions Paddy walks through with clients each year to address the forgotten pension problem deliberately rather than letting inertia decide.

Read the full blog post at www.informeddecisions.ie