My own pensions were my first case. I got a surprise.

I built PensionHunter because pensions do not follow you when you move countries. I thought I understood the problem. Then I ran my own history through our research pipeline and learned I only understood half of it.

I am Dutch. I worked at a university in Utrecht in 1989, then at ABN AMRO in Amsterdam until 1992, and I left the Netherlands at 28 and never lived there again. Our pipeline identified both funds in minutes: ABP for the university year, and the ABN AMRO company pension fund, found through the Dutch central bank register, no DigiD needed.

The surprise was everything around the two names.

I remembered receiving about four thousand guilders from ABN AMRO when I left in 1992. I always assumed it was some tax refund. It was almost certainly my pension, paid out or bought out under the rules of that era. The only way to know what, if anything, remains is the fund's own records, because the national pension portal only shows what you hold now. If a pension was bought out decades ago, the portal shows nothing, and nothing looks exactly like never existed.

The bigger surprise was my Dutch state pension. AOW builds up by residence, not employment. Roughly every year you live in the Netherlands between your late teens and state pension age is worth about two percent. I left at 28, so around a fifth of a full AOW has my name on it. Nobody had ever told me, and here is the part that stays with me: if you live abroad, the SVB does not write to you. You have to apply yourself, six months before your AOW age, or it simply does not arrive.

A fifth of a state pension, sitting there for thirty years, waiting for a letter I would never have known to send. That is the business we are in. Most people who moved countries have a version of this story. They just have not run the search yet.