I logged into an old HSA today. Not because I had a sudden urge to relive my benefits enrollment paperwork from a job I haven’t worked in years, but because I was doing a little financial housekeeping, the kind of task that sits on your to do list right next to “clean out the garage” and “finally learn what that warning light means.”
And there it was. A fee. Three dollars a month, charged quietly and consistently, for the crime of having an HSA that I opened, funded, and then promptly forgot about the second I left that employer.
I’d love to tell you this was a shocking, never before seen betrayal. It was not. This isn’t even my first time at this particular rodeo. About 30 years ago, an employer offered an IRA instead of a 401k, because apparently that was a thing companies did sometimes, and being the dutiful little saver that I was, I contributed. When I left that job, I didn’t check back in on the account, because there wasn’t much in it and frankly I had other things going on, like presumably figuring out how to be a functioning adult. Turns out that account had been charging me five dollars a month the entire time, for no reason other than the simple fact that it existed and I wasn’t looking.
Neither of these fees is going to bankrupt anyone. Three bucks here, five bucks there, that’s not exactly a financial emergency. But here’s the thing about small recurring fees: they’re patient. They don’t need to be big to do damage. They just need to be consistent and unnoticed, and time will happily do the rest of the work for them.
So today’s question for you, dear reader, is the same one I had to ask myself with a slightly embarrassed look on my face: where is all your money? Do you have an old IRA, 401k, or HSA sitting out there somewhere, quietly leaking a few dollars a month into the pocket of an institution that has long since stopped thinking about you?
The Math on “It’s Only a Few Bucks”
Let’s actually do the math here, because the FI Community loves nothing more than turning a vague feeling of “that’s annoying” into an actual number.
Three dollars a month is 36 dollars a year. Five dollars a month is 60 dollars a year. On their own, those numbers are not going to ruin your retirement. But money that’s just sitting in an account isn’t doing nothing. It’s also not growing the way it should be, because that fee is eating into your balance every single month, which means there’s less principal left to compound.
Let’s say you’ve got 8,000 dollars sitting in an old HSA, earning a reasonable 7% average annual return, and you’re being charged 3 dollars a month, which is 36 dollars a year. Run that out for 20 years and you’re not just out 720 dollars in fees. You’re out that 720 dollars plus everything that money would have earned if it had stayed invested instead of being skimmed off the top every month. Depending on how the fee is actually structured, that can easily turn into a couple thousand dollars of lost growth over two decades, just from a fee that felt too small to bother with.
Multiply that by every account you’ve forgotten about, and the dollar amount starts to look a lot less like rounding error and a lot more like a vacation you didn’t take, a car repair you had to put on a credit card, or a meaningfully bigger number on your FI tracking spreadsheet.
This is the quiet, unglamorous cousin of the more dramatic financial mistakes everyone warns you about. Nobody writes viral posts about “the account I forgot to close.” (Seriously, we’re talking about $3.) Everybody writes viral posts about timing the market wrong or buying a single meme stock at the absolute peak. But the forgotten account fee is sneakier, because it doesn’t feel like a mistake. It feels like nothing happened at all, which is exactly the problem.
Why These Accounts Go Forgotten in the First Place
If you’re sitting there thinking “how does a person just forget about a financial account,” let me gently remind you how life actually works. People change jobs. People move. People get married, get divorced, have kids, lose track of passwords, get a new email address, and generally have approximately one billion other things competing for their attention besides the IRA they opened at a job they left half a lifetime ago.
HSAs are particularly easy to forget because they’re often tied directly to your employer’s benefits provider. The second you leave that job, the account doesn’t transfer with you automatically. It just sits there, parked with whatever administrator your old employer chose, quietly accumulating maintenance fees because you’re no longer an active employee getting the fee waived as a perk.
Old 401ks and IRAs have a similar problem. If the balance is small, a lot of people figure it’s not worth the hassle of rolling it over, so they just leave it. The administrator, who is running a business and not a charity, then charges a maintenance fee to keep the account open, because why wouldn’t they. You’re not checking the statements. You’re not asking questions. You’re the financial equivalent of a gym membership nobody canceled.
And look, I say all of this with love, because I am very clearly part of the problem here too. I host a personal finance podcast for a living and I still had an account quietly charging me three dollars a month without my notice. This isn’t a “smart people don’t make this mistake” situation. This is an “everyone is busy and accounts are boring” situation.
What to Actually Do About It
Okay, enough wallowing in our shared shame. Let’s fix this.
Step one: make a list. Think through every job you’ve ever had, going back as far as you can remember, even the ones that feel embarrassingly long ago. For each one, ask yourself whether you had any kind of retirement account, HSA, or similar benefit, and whether you actually did anything with it when you left.
Step two: track them down. If you remember the provider, just log in. If you don’t remember, or if the login doesn’t work anymore because your email address from 2014 is long gone, there are a few good tools for this. The National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits is worth a search if you think a 401k might have gotten lost in the shuffle. Many states also run unclaimed property databases, and you’d honestly be surprised how often forgotten retirement funds end up there after enough years of inactivity.
Step three: read the actual fee schedule. Once you find an account, don’t just glance at the balance and feel relieved it still exists. Look specifically for maintenance fees, account fees, or inactivity fees. They’re often buried in language that sounds boring on purpose, because boring language discourages you from reading it closely. That’s not a coincidence.
Step four: decide on a destination. For an old 401k, you generally have a few choices. You can roll it into an IRA, which usually gives you more investment options and lower fees. You can roll it into your current employer’s 401k, if your new plan allows incoming rollovers, which keeps things consolidated. Or in some cases, if the balance is small enough, the old plan might force the issue for you and cash it out or roll it automatically, which is its own can of worms involving taxes, so don’t let it get to that point if you can help it.
For an old HSA, the move is usually to roll it into a new HSA with lower fees or no fees at all, assuming you’re still HSA eligible. If you’re not currently HSA eligible, you can still keep the funds invested and use them for qualified medical expenses down the road, but it’s worth finding a provider that doesn’t charge you a monthly toll just for existing.
Step five: actually close the loop. This is the step everyone skips. Finding the account and feeling vaguely motivated isn’t the same as actually doing the rollover paperwork. Set a calendar reminder, block out twenty minutes, and just do it. Future you, who is busy compounding actual investment returns instead of paying maintenance fees, will be very grateful.
The Psychology of Small Leaks
There’s a reason small recurring fees are so easy to ignore, and it’s the same reason a slow leak in your roof is easier to ignore than a hole. A hole demands action immediately. Water is pouring in, you can see it, you fix it that day. A slow leak just shows up as a slightly higher water bill or a faint stain you keep meaning to look into. By the time you actually deal with it, you’ve often paid for a lot more damage than you would have if you’d caught it on day one.
Financial fees work the same way psychologically. A $3,000 surprise bill gets your attention instantly. A $3 monthly fee doesn’t register as a threat at all, even though over a long enough timeline it can add up to a meaningfully similar amount of lost money. Our brains are just not great at noticing slow, small, repeated losses the same way they notice one big obvious one. That’s not a character flaw. That’s just how human attention works, and financial institutions absolutely understand this, whether or not they’d ever admit it out loud.
This is exactly why an annual “where is all my money” audit is worth doing, even if it feels like overkill. You’re not checking because you expect disaster. You’re checking because disaster, in this case, looks suspiciously boring and easy to miss.
So, Where Is All Your Money?
Here’s your homework, and I promise it’s a lot less painful than doing actual taxes. Take fifteen minutes this week and think back through every job you’ve ever had. Write down any retirement account, HSA, or old brokerage account you might have left behind. Then go find out what’s actually happening in there.
You might find nothing. You might log in and discover everything is fine, the fees are reasonable, and you wasted fifteen minutes for peace of mind, which honestly isn’t the worst trade.
Or you might find your own version of my $3 HSA fee or my $5 IRA fee, quietly nibbling away at money you worked hard to save in the first place. Either way, you’ll know. And knowing where your money actually is, instead of just assuming it’s fine because nobody’s called you about it, is about as on brand for the FI Community as it gets.
Go check your old accounts. Your future self, the one who actually gets to retire on time instead of slowly funding some custodian’s monthly fee revenue, will thank you.
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