By the time most people have spent a decade or more working internationally, their financial life has been spread across multiple countries, employers, currencies, and platforms, often without any deliberate plan.

Think about how it typically unfolds. You worked in the UK for several years before leaving, accumulating one, two, perhaps three workplace pension pots from different employers. You may have started a personal pension or an ISA at some point. When you moved abroad, you opened bank accounts in the new country, possibly started a savings plan through an adviser you met shortly after arriving, and perhaps bought a property back home that is now being rented out.

Each piece made sense at the time. Each decision was reasonable in isolation. But nobody ever stood back and looked at the whole picture, because life was busy, and the individual parts felt manageable.

The result, for many expats, is a financial portfolio that looks less like a coherent strategy and more like a collection of financial decisions made across a decade, sitting in different places, in different currencies, with different risk profiles, different fees, and no clear connection to any overall goal.

This is not an individual quirk. It is a structural issue affecting millions of people.

According to the Pensions Policy Institute, £31.1 billion sits in lost or forgotten pension pots in the UK, across 3.3 million individual pots that people have simply lost track of. That figure has risen by 60% since 2018, driven largely by the rise of auto-enrolment, which has created a generation of workers who accumulated small pension pots at every employer without ever consolidating them.

For expats, the problem is compounded. When you leave the UK, your pension does not follow you. It stays where it is, with the provider, continuing to be invested — but without you receiving statements, monitoring performance, or making any decisions about it. Years pass. Employers change names, merge, or close. Providers transfer books of business. The contact details on your file become out of date. And what was once a modest but meaningful retirement asset becomes effectively invisible.

The money is not gone. It is still there, still invested, still compounding in whatever fund it was defaulted into when you joined the scheme. But if you do not know it exists, you cannot manage it, cannot consolidate it, and cannot ensure it is working as efficiently as possible for your retirement.

There is a tempting assumption that a forgotten pension is a harmless one — that the money is quietly growing in the background and you can simply collect it when the time comes. This is partly true, but it misses several important points.

Default funds are not always good funds. Most workplace pensions place contributions into a default investment fund when you join. That fund may have been appropriate for a generic employee profile at the time, but it almost certainly is not optimised for your current age, risk tolerance, time horizon, or the currency you will eventually need in retirement. Without reviewing it, you have no idea what it is doing.

Fees vary enormously. Older pension schemes, particularly those set up before the modern era of low-cost index investing — can carry annual management charges that are significantly higher than what is available today. The difference between a 2% annual charge and a 0.3% charge on a pension pot that has been sitting untouched for fifteen years represents a very significant sum of money.

You cannot plan around what you cannot see. If you do not have a clear picture of what you own, you cannot make informed decisions about how much you need to save, whether you are on track for retirement, or how your assets are balanced across risk, geography, and currency. You are making financial decisions with incomplete information — which is the same as making them with no information.

A financial audit sounds more daunting than it is. At its core, it is simply a process of writing down everything you own and understanding what each piece is worth, what it costs to hold, what it is invested in, and how it fits into your overall picture.

For UK pensions, the government’s free Pension Tracing Service can help locate pots from previous employers using nothing more than the employer’s name and the approximate dates you worked there. It will not give you the current value, that requires contacting the provider directly but it is the first step to knowing what exists.

For investments and savings, the process is simply one of gathering statements, logging in to accounts you may not have accessed in years, and writing down current values and providers.

For policies, life cover, income protection, savings plans, it means reviewing what you have, whether it is still appropriate, and what it is actually costing.

Once you have that full picture, the next step is assessing whether the component parts are working well individually and whether they make sense collectively. Are you over-exposed to a single currency? Are you carrying high-fee legacy products that could be replaced? Do you have gaps, areas of risk that are not covered at all?

This is not a one-time task. It is something worth revisiting at least annually, and certainly at any point when your circumstances change significantly.

Ask yourself the following questions. If you cannot answer them confidently, a financial audit is overdue.

How many pension pots do you have, and what is each one currently worth? What funds are they invested in, and when did you last review them? What is the total value of your investments across all platforms and currencies? Do you know the annual charges on each product you hold? What would happen to your assets if you died tomorrow and is your current structure set up to pass them to the right people, in the right way, with minimum friction?

Most expats who go through this process for the first time discover at least one surprise, an old pension they had forgotten about, a product charging far more than expected, or a gap in their coverage that would have created real problems if left unaddressed.