July 2019 newsletter

When we plan for life after retirement, we can often tend to focus on saving for a comfortable standard of living and travel. It can be difficult to factor in anything other than a happy and healthy journey as we get older, even if we know the reality can be very different.

What do you do if you’re working in the gig economy and want to build up a super nest egg?

Gone are the days when ethical investing existed on the periphery of investment management and the debate centred around whether or not environmental, social and governance (ESG) focussed funds could actually perform as well as mainstream funds.

A recent court case, known as the Narumon case, demonstrates how important it is for self-managed super fund (SMSF) trustees to ensure their documentation is up-to-date, and that binding death benefit nominations are valid.

An easy way to determine if you believe your super fund is good value, is to assess the cost of your super fund against the average costs for the different types of super funds available.

The gold medal goes to AustralianSuper, the country’s largest super fund, with an average annual return of 9.8% per year for the last 10 years.

In this article you can find super fund performance for 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 and 15 years, up to the latest financial year and across five different investment options. We’re grateful to Chant West for providing the statistics in this article.

In this article you can discover the investment performance for 12 different asset classes over various timeframes. For all asset classes there is data for 1, 3 and 5 financial years, and for most asset classes there is also data over 7, 10 and 15 financial years.

If you’re retiring this financial year it pays to think about possible timing issues before you start drawing down on your superannuation.

While the exact number is hard to pin down, various industry estimates put the total number of Australian retirees who are now living overseas at around 90,000, a figure which has risen steadily in recent years.

Self-managed super fund (SMSF) members have a number of options in terms of how to treat their fund when they head overseas. The time they intend to be away is a key factor to consider, as is how many of the SMSF’s members are moving overseas and their percentage of the beneficial interests.

The Federal Government has finally bowed to pressure to cut pension deeming rates but stopped short of passing on the full cut in official interest rates.

As official interest rates drop to a record low of 1%, Age Pensioners who depend on income from cash investments face a double whammy. Not only do they receive less income from their bank deposits as interest rates fall, but they also risk losing some pension because they are deemed to earn more than they do.

On 22 March 2020 the Federal government announced that from 1 May 2020 the deeming rates would be lowered to 0.25% (lower rate) and 2.25% (upper rate).

When you die, the tax man can be pretty quick to put his hand out to take his cut, and this also applies to the balance of your super account.

When you retire, there are lots of decisions to make about whether to take a lump sum or start an account-based pension. You also need to decide how you would like the remaining balance of your super account to be distributed when you die.

When it comes to your super benefits, tax is always at the heart of it, whether it’s when you make a contribution, or when you take your money out at the other end.