Wills and Estate Planning Adelaide: DIY Superannuation
Have you been watching the news recently? It has been a challenge trying to make sense of all the current news reports on this financial crisis.
A lot of Australians choose to remain blinkered about the impact that the current crisis will continue to have in our local markets as well as globally. If you are sitting in your home in suburban Australia thinking that all these financial crisis events don’t relate to you, you might be in for a nasty surprise.
For most people, their primary concern is the cost of petrol, rising food prices, health care and housing affordability. Those concerns don’t magically disappear when you retire…in fact they tend to get magnified through the lense of “fixed income”.
Chances are that you have some form of superannuation and in most cases it is probably a managed super fund.
At the moment, almost all of the big managed super funds in Australia are announcing huge (20% to 30%) reductions (losses) of capital of value. Some funds have lost more than 30%. They might try to “spin” this as no big deal, and encourage you to take a “long-term” view of the market performance. They’ll show a graph of managed-funds values over 20 years or so, and say that you have to expect some “swings and roundabouts”. Of course the fund managers get paid whether the fund values go up or down …
Maybe this isn’t too alarming for some people. However, if you’re in your 60’s and looking to retire the next couple of years, how do you recover from a pretty big dent in your retirement fund?
You might be forgiven for wondering just what you’ve been paying-for with those managers’ fees all these years, and whether there might be a better solution?