Consolidate Your Super This New Year
It’s the start of the new year and the time is ripe for making New Year’s resolutions. Consolidating your super makes for an easy and effective resolution to potentially save you extra money.
It is important to know that many super funds charge fixed costs. The more super funds you are a part of (you may not know you have more than one), the more you pay in fixed costs, regardless of the size of your balance in each fund. For example, fees of $100 p.a. on a balance of $1000, with an annual return of 7%, would result in a net decrease of $30 to your balance after one year. Put simply, by consolidating your super, you may only have to pay one set of fees.
It is also important to check for lost/unclaimed super, which may in some cases be held by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). If you’ve ever changed jobs, it’s possible that you have unclaimed super you don’t know about. This isn’t all that uncommon, with to date $17.5 billion dollars in unclaimed super being held by the ATO.
How do you find and consolidate your Super?
Consolidating your super is a relatively simple process. Before online superannuation products came out, it could take hours to sort this all out, and cost you thousands of dollars if you asked a financial planner for help. However, today it can be done in a few minutes. This can potentially save you a significant amount for tomorrow for only a few minutes today.
Raiz Super makes the consolidation process easy, and can be done in minutes from within the Raiz app. When you sign up for Raiz Super, we will automatically search for any funds and unclaimed or lost super to your name, giving you the option to pick which ones you want to roll into Raiz Super. If you find the funds but choose not to roll into Raiz Super then you occur no fees and you have not opened a Raiz Super account. You will not incur a fee or open your Raiz Super account until your first contribution, so you can utilise this search function for free. For more information on Raiz fees, click here.
Below is a quick video demonstrating how you can use Raiz Super to simply and easily look for lost super and consolidate on your mobile phone.
How much do you need for retirement?
It’s easy to say why super is important – in order to grow your nest egg, but how much super is enough to live a comfortable retirement? According ASIC’s MoneySmart, in order to support a ‘comfortable’ lifestyle in retirement, it’ll cost singles $42,764 per year, or couples $60,264 per year. MoneySmart also has a superannuation calculator on their website, that calculates how much super you will have when you retire based off your age, employer contributions, and voluntary contributions. This is useful for tracking how your super is performing and planning how much you need to contribute to hit your retirement goals.
Consolidating your super is a simple and easy way to start working towards hitting your target for a comfortable lifestyle, well worth the few minutes it will take to search via the Raiz app – and we think it would also make for a nice and easy New Year’s resolution! 😊
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Important Information
The information on this website is general advice only. This means it does not take into account any person’s particular investment objectives, financial situation or investment needs. If you are an investor, you should consult your licensed adviser before acting on any information contained in this article to fully understand the benefits and risk associated with the product.
A Product Disclosure Statement for Raiz Invest and/or Raiz Invest Super are available on the Raiz Invest website and App. A person must read and consider the Product Disclosure Statement in deciding whether, or not, to acquire and continue to hold interests in the product. The risks of investing in this product are fully set out in the Product Disclosure Statement and include the risks that would ordinarily apply to investing.
The information may be based on assumptions or market conditions which change without notice. This could impact the accuracy of the information.
Under no circumstances is the information to be used by, or presented to, a person for the purposes of deciding about investing in Raiz Invest or Raiz Invest Super.
Past return performance of the Raiz products should not be relied on for making a decision to invest in a Raiz product and is not a good predictor of future performance.
