Hey all, I have an account with AustralianSuper and wondering which investment option seems best? At the moment i'm in the balanced option but wondering if in this world of QE to infinity if there is a better option? Not looking for straight up investment advice, just would like to hear peoples thoughts. a SMSF is very interesting to me but just trying to sort this out first. Thanks to anyone that can share there thoughts. Cheers Jimmy
Alan Kohler has had a beef of late on how poorly managed funds have done with equities (i.e. shares) over recent times. He made a point that Govt. Bonds have outperformed equities and are less prone to volatility. Bonds mean you can retire when you need to & not have to wait till the sharemarket recovers. No mention of gold, but he makes note of the number of Aussies rejecting the big super funds (and their charges & fees despite negative performance) and moving to Self-managed funds.
You can can use their member direct function to buy stocks if you want. Cost about $15 a month from memory. You can allocate how much you want to use so you can continue using your existing plan. I started using it about 3 months ago and have increased my meagre account balance by just over 10% in that time by simply picking some gold\silver\oil stocks. The member direct part of the site is crap but it gets the job done. Unfortunately it is limited in what you can purchase like etfs and some mining stocks are unavailable so I've now applied for a SMSF with esuperfund.
I tried a lot of different approaches with many Super Funds but could not get what I wanted out of any of them Happily been running a SMSF with Esuperfund now for over a year, I would suggest just bite the bullet and set one up, once the initial hard stuff is done it's really worth it
+1 for setting up an smsf with esuperfund. im the same age as you and decided that even though i had shit all in my super i was better off managing it myself than letting it stay in the ponzi scheme of industry super funds. plus esuperfund is always having specials it seems, so you can get some deal where you dont have to pay any fees for them doing the accounting for you in the next financial year or whatever.
See this thread on all-cash Retirement Savings Accounts: http://forums.silverstackers.com/topic-28559-retirement-savings-accounts-smsf-bank-account.html If you're just starting out in the workforce, it might be work just being all in cash with no fees until you hit a balance of, say, $10k and then look at setting up a SMSF or using a roll-your-own-portfolio through one of the managed funds. Sit down and do the sums on returns and fees and work out where you're likely to be best off now, two years from now, five years from now, ten years, etc.
http://forums.silverstackers.com/topic-27971-young-people-and-smsfs.html heres a link to the thread that i made about it, theres some pretty sound advice in there.
