Dominique Broadway shows how to find and consolidate old 401(k)s left behind after job changes. Use employer contacts or lookup websites to locate accounts, then roll them into a single IRA via ACAT transfer to avoid taxes and simplify management. Leaving money dormant costs you significant growth.
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So there's probably a chance that you have worked at a job before, left that job, went to a new job, and kept it moving, and maybe even left that job and went to another job. And if that's the case, you probably have old 401(k)s or old retirement accounts that are literally sitting there collecting dust and not doing what they're supposed to do for you, which is making money. My name is Dominique Broadway, an award-winning personal finance expert Founder of Finances Demystified and author of The Wealth Decision. And today, I want to tell you exactly what you need to do with these old 401(k)s and retirement accounts that you have sitting around. Because this is a question that I get all the time. Dominique, what do I do with my old 401(k) or my old account that's sitting there? I haven't touched it in years. I don't even know what's in there. What should I do with it? Well, let me tell you. First off, you need to go and find all of these accounts. You will be so surprised how many people have accounts. There's like literally entire websites dedicated to this that will— and I'll include the link to one of them below— that help you to actually search and find and locate your old retirement accounts that you may have had years and years ago. Some of us even had like retirement accounts when we were teenagers working odd and end jobs. And believe it or not, there are money— there could still be money sitting in those accounts. So the first thing you need to do is contact your old employer and ask, hey, who was my, uh, who was our 401k provider, whoever it may be, and get their contact information. And honestly, do this for all of your jobs that you may have worked at, because believe it or not, if you did not take that money with you, there's a strong chance that money is still literally sitting there. So So, you want to contact the old provider or the brokerage firm that holds your 401(k). Ask them to send you a statement, alright? So, they can email it or they can mail it old traditional way. Or they may be able to give you login access to actually see— log in and see what's in your account, okay? Once you do that, you want to determine, "Okay, what is inside of this account? Has my money been sitting in cash? Has my money been sitting in What specific investments has— is the money still in there? How much is in there and what type of account is it, right? Because it could be a traditional 401(k), it could be a 403(b), it could be a— what do you call— a Roth 401(k), etc., etc., okay? Once you know what's in there and what type of account it is, the next thing you want to do is go and open up your own investment account. Now, this is a rollover IRA. I'm sorry, if this is a traditional IRA then or a traditional 401(k), then you can open up what we call a rollover IRA. Once you open up that rollover IRA at whatever company you want it to be, this could be at any company you want, Robinhood, Fidelity, whoever. Or if you even want to open up the rollover IRA wherever the account is currently held. But you need to open up a separate account. And then from there, you're going to request that the current brokerage firm does what we call an ACAT, which is short for account transfer, basically, right? So, they would do an ACAT and move all of the funds exactly as they are over into the new account. Now, the reason why I like to move the funds the way they are, which is what we call an in-kind transfer, is because we don't want to potentially lock in any gains or we don't want to lock in any losses. Because maybe that day the market's down and you just sell it just to get out. Just to transfer it over. We don't want to lock in unnecessary losses if we don't need to, okay? So, I would ask them to do a transfer in kind, ACAT, transfer in kind for the money from there over to your new brokerage account. Once it's in your new brokerage account, now you can do whatever you want to do with it, okay? You can trade it if you want. You can invest it how you want. You can put it in index funds. You can put it in stocks. You can do whatever you want to do. But the goal is that you are having your own control over the money. Now, if you find that you actually have multiple different retirement accounts that have just been sitting, you can roll all of them over into that one rollover IRA. So instead of having multiple different accounts over here, you can have everything rolled over nice and clean into one account, and you can manage all of your old retirement accounts there. Now, another reason why this is great is because you could literally be missing out on tens, if not hundreds, if not millions of dollars over your lifetime if you keep this money at these old brokerages brokerage firms because you're not looking at them. Which means that they could just literally be sitting in cash. They could be not getting rebalanced or not being able to invest into new rate opportunities. So, the key here is to get all this money under your own control. From there, you can manage on your own. You can talk to someone at the brokerage firm to help you manage it or even seek a financial planner. But that is literally how simple it is to gather all of your old retirement accounts and move them over. So, that age-old question, "Dominique, what do I do with my retirement account?" When I leave, this is all you need to do. All right, so hopefully this was helpful. If you have any questions, drop them below. 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