Welsh Heart

I have established that my super has to stay in Australia and I can't get my mucky paws on it until retirement wether that be in the UK or Australia.

What can I do to stop my super dwindling away with fees and bad management? I only have 6 years worth of super but it is not a small amount of money and I would like to protect it if possible.

brits1

can you pay into it via the internet...i know with my super i can pay money into it myself via our aussie bank account....

dunroving

Slight side note, but is the Oz "super" like a US pension scheme where you invest it in funds that you choose? So it's not like British NI/state pension or US Soc Sec, where there's a standard benefit for each year of contribution?

If it is like a self-selected set of funds, my advice would be to go for the lowest management fee fund that tracks an index - these are increasingly available elsewhere in the world, and in fact perform better on average than most managed funds.

TBH, over the years I have become increasingly cycnical about actively managed funds. They skim off silly fees even if the fund LOSES MONEY(!!), and even when they do "beat the market", it's usually by so little that the management fees brings it down lower than the basic market performance anyway. In the Money pages you tend to only read about the few that have a lucky year and have a huge gain, often due to luck as much as to skillful managers.

Sherlock Holmes

Yes

dunroving

Interesting, thanks for the insight - then I'd repeat my advice to the OP that the money should, if possible, be put into index-linked/tracker funds or ETF's (exchange traded funds - Google will tell people what these are if you don't know) and left alone. I'm presuming these types of funds are available in the Oz "super" system and that they have low fees as is the case in the US and UK.

My US pension (with TIAA-CREF) is largely in a mixture of that sort of fund and in bonds. If the OP is quite young (< 35 yrs), I'd suggest leaning more towards funds than bonds, then gradually moving money over into bonds as you get closer to retirement. I think I saw a formula once that said if you subtract your age from 100, that tells you how much of your pension fund you should put into stocks/shares - so a 30 yr old can risk having 70% in stocks/shares and a 55 year old should have only 45% in stocks/shares (I mean funds, not actual individual company shares). I think that was the formula - maybe someone else has heard of it?

One thing is for sure - I would not leave the money in actively-managed funds as a) fees are too high, b) they generally don't perform well, and c) you won't have time to keep monitoring them if you are 1000's of miles away, focusing on your finances in your new country (UK)

obewan

Would also like to hear if there are any suggestions.
I had to leave mine there too, enforced govt savings being contributed to private companies, andI can do nothing about it.

In my case, not many years contributed, but still many years to retirement. I have mine in the lowest fee paying fund I could find, but they still levy a monthly fee plus annually a percentage of the value of the fund. An outrageous ripoff, as I can see that in < 10 years time there will be nothing left of it. Like I said, an enforced contribution to 'super' companies... ugh.

Really wish there was a way I could transfer it to UK pension. I understand the rule it should stay in a fund, no problem with that, but forcing it to stay in Aus, well that's just protectionism.