The superannuation industry has a reputation for being opaque, almost famously so. Recent legislative changes have made some difference to this but for the most part the default MySuper options are still quite $$$. It’s worth seeing if your fund has indexed options, especially given the MUCH lower costs involved.
I’ve been with unisuper for a while now (since about 2012) and they were fine - good user interface, helpful staff and short call wait times. In about 2020 (post fires but pre pandemic; real 7 plagues vibes), I switched to a global environment opportunities product within the unisuper fund offerings that did pretty well initially (partly because rise in the value of Tesla and Samsung). But after a few months it started to get super expensive. As my balance grew, I started to shell out way too much money in (percent) fees. And it didn’t seem like any of the bets were paying off. So i began looking around for low investment fees options. In particular I wanted to see if i could find any fixed investment fee options. A veritable unicorn, I later discovered.
The much vaunted launch of Vanguard Super got my hopes up a little bit but after looking at their fees structure, I felt they were overcharging. Percent admin fees are soo 2015.
And then I found hostplus, who were offering a range of indexed products at 0.04-0.05 % investment fee. I had to ask the trusty group chat if my eyes were deceiving me. They weren’t.
But I had one stumbling block and it was mostly emotional. Almost 12 years ago I had a hostplus account when I was waitressing part time at uni. I went to try and claim the money back some four years later only to discover that it was wiped in fees. No one from hostplus had been in touch with me to let me know that I had a dormant account (despite the fact that they had my email address and phone number) but they were happy to take MY money. There was about 2000 dollars in there that those leeches just helped themselves to. Yes, as you can tell it’s still a sore point.
Hopefully that explains why i waited at least two months before biting the bullet. I got in touch with unisuper to ask them if they were planning on offering any indexed options but they told me that they didn’t have any in the pipeline. I went so far as to register for their AGM to ask a question about this but then decided that it was too much trouble and I was still bleeding money into some investment managers pockets for not much return.
I filled in the paperwork to create a new member account at hostplus and transferred my entire balance out of unisuper (it took me less than ten minutes).
Undoubtedly, this process was made easier by knowing that I could always go back to unisuper in the future, now that industry funds were open. The ease with which I was able to transfer shocked me. I did a balance transfer once before in 2015 (ING had a fee-free product for 9 months) and that took at least three days of chasing up to find out whether it had progressed.
Moral of the story is - shop around, always.
Not financial advice, etc etc