This letter could increase the finances of retirees.
This is the kind of good news that we would like to receive every day. Imagine: one morning, you go to collect your mail in your mailbox. In the middle of the newspaper and the flyers, a letter stamped “Info Retraite”. Yet another advertisement that we don’t care about? Maybe not. You may have been sent information allowing you to earn a little more money each month, after you forgot. 50,000 people had this nice surprise last year.
Building your retirement file is a tedious process. Going back over 40 years of pay slips is not an easy task. At a time when digitizing documents was far from being the norm, reconstructing your entire career is sometimes almost a feat. So, inevitably, there may be errors or omissions. A detriment to your wallet.
In France, if you do not apply for a retirement pension, it will never be paid to you. So, if you forgot that at the age of 20, you contributed to a particular pension fund, the latter will never grant you what is due to you. But things have changed.
For 20 years now, the “Union retraite” structure has been responsible for informing the French of their pension rights. Every five years, it sends a bulletin to anyone between the ages of 35 and 65, allowing them to have an update on their pension rights, to know which funds will have to pay them a pension and even, from the age of 55, to obtain an estimate of the amount that could be received. Thanks to this document, it is therefore possible to know if there has been an oversight.
60 million consumers reports for example the story of Maryse who had notably forgotten since 2004 to claim 300 euros per year from Agirc-Arrco. It was this letter, received one morning, which made her realize this and encouraged her to start the process.
Other retirees should also benefit from this document. “People who retired a long time ago did not benefit from the unique information that exists today. […] “We noticed that, over a given generation, a certain number of retirees had unclaimed rights from a fund that they had probably forgotten about,” explained Thomas Tracou, communications director for Union Retraite with 60 million consumers.
In this year 2024, it is the retirees born in 1949, 1950 and 1954 who could receive this letter bearing good news. However, do not expect to recover hundreds and thousands: no retroactivity applies. Pensions not claimed for years will not be paid as catch-up.