© 2025 Pension Rights Center. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 2.5 Generic License.
Two incredible success stories from the Trellis Pension and Retirement Rights Project—Mid America Region highlight the fact that people getting assistance from the Pension Counseling Projects often have positive, life-changing outcomes.
The Trellis Pension and Retirement Rights Project—Mid America Region is one of six counseling projects supported by the Administration on Community Living that provide critical assistance to people with retirement benefit problems in 31 states. Since 1993, the Pension Counseling and Information Program has recovered over $294 million in retirement benefits and assisted more than 70,000 individuals.
At age 63, Joe, whose employer was shut down years after he left, began a quest to find the location of his pension so he could apply for benefits when he became eligible at age 65. The U.S. Department of Labor told him his pension was held at Company X, which denied having it and instead directed him to an insurance company. The insurer said it lacked any record of his pension and directed him back to Company X.
Joe then contacted Trellis for assistance.
The Trellis attorney who took his case contacted both the insurer and Company X. The company denied any knowledge of the plan. The insurer said that it held the pension during a merger of Joe’s employer and Company X but never purchased annuities for plan members. The Trellis attorney contacted Company X’s chief counsel, who retained a law firm specializing in pension matters to handle the inquiry. The Trellis attorney sent copies to the law firm of Joe’s pension documents, which fortunately he had saved for many years. Ultimately, the law firm determined that Company X owed Joe a single life $200 monthly annuity pension
Soon after Joe completed his application for the monthly pension, he called the Trellis attorney and gave her devastating news– he had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Recognizing that the monthly life annuity was no longer best for Joe, the Trellis attorney helped Joe select a different option—a one-time lump sum pension of $28,000.
When Joe ultimately got the money, he told the Trellis attorney that he was going to use it to pay off his mortgage, possibly take a trip, and then pursue treatment to fight his disease. He thanked her, saying he would never have received the money without Trellis’ help and persistence.
Stan had been getting a $1,120 monthly pension from his local union’s plan for 26 years. In November 2024, at the age of 89, his monthly direct deposits abruptly stopped. He later received a letter from the local telling him that it had discovered a sales agreement issued 26 years earlier transferring his pension obligation to another plan. The letter said that Stan now owed his plan $320,000.
With the help of his daughter, Stan sought assistance from Trellis. The Trellis attorney assigned to his case immediately contacted the plan and told the plan’s attorney that she needed to see the sales agreement in question.
After giving the agreement a close look, the attorney discovered that it clearly transferred the pensions of the first 163 named plan members on a list of members. However, Stan was number 164 on the list and therefore wasn’t affected by the transfer.
The plan’s attorney was at first skeptical that Stan wasn’t covered by the sales agreement, saying that no one on the list, including those at 165 and higher, were currently being paid a pension. The Trellis attorney pointed out that, given the fact that Stanley was now 90 years old, it was possible that no one was getting a pension because everyone else eligible for one had died.
Meanwhile, Stanley and his wife had just been tentatively admitted to a total care retirement community from a wait list but needed the income verification of the pension payment to finalize the admission. The Trellis attorney told the plan that without the pension income, the retirement community would move on to the next person on the waiting list, leaving Stanley and his wife out in the cold. She told the plan that it needed to act immediately or risk Stanley losing his admission.
The plan’s attorney quickly conceded that Stanley was owed the pension and, within 24 hours, arranged to have Stanley’s payments reinstated along with back payments. Happily, with the help of Trellis, Stanley and his wife were admitted to the retirement community.
This publication was supported by the Administration for Community Living (ACL), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $415,000 funded by ACL/HHS and $158,334 funded by non-government source(s). The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by ACL/HHS, or the U.S. Government.
