Yeah with first state super - all their rates are pretty competitive. The guy on the phone is just a worker and he thought that I should be able to work it out myself but statements only go back to 2012 on the net. I will email them though because I think it is a matter of transparency - doubt other funds are any different.
Sounds right to me. If you get stuck feel free to PM me.
Fair enough you sound knowledgeable about this stuff. A guy at my work said he had 35K in super 15 years ago and now has 365K lol - he has been making voluntary contributions. Again this only added to my suspicions that my super has not performed well. And yes I know information like this taken in isolation means you’re likely to come to a false conclusion.
This too is scary all the debt on those assets. It’s a chain reaction waiting to happen. Loan to value ratio is first, that goes above 80% bank will ask for insurance. On a half a mil loan it will cost you about $4k / $5k, so on $2M it could be $20k. One person sells a unit, might have to sell at a loss. Now multiply this out and suddenly lots of property is for sale. Now the loan is worth more than the property and we are in a fire sale. Who’s going to buy a property when prices start tumbling?
Remember to it might be what you’re invested in. Particularly group super policies have a tendancy to be more risk adverse. You could be 100% in fixed interest!
I’m also weary on what people say their balances are. 9 / 10 people on the phone say one thing, when you get their paperwork in front of you it’s always less.
The good news is you’ve taken interest and will be getting on the right track 
Do you really think that when yu ring your super fund, they should find it difficult to let you know how much you’ve put in as a contribution, and tell you to work it yourself?? Or are you talking about something else?/
I’m with VicSuper, and they can tell me the answer to any question in that vein, pretty much instantly, once they’ve accessed my account. They have since run me through to get sorted & set up online, so I can go in and see pretty much all I need to know myself.
That sounded weird, and/or slack to me.
Smart, rich people?
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Overdoing the debt is what scares me too. Possibly cos I was just old enough to recognise what was going on in 1989 when my parents were struggling to pay 17% interest on an investment property they’d bought a couple of years earlier.
I’m in my late 30s. I bought four years ago, LVR only about 60% cos I had significant savings boosted with very significant help from my parents. Could have managed it several years earlier were it not for a failed business venture that cost me a house deposit sized amount of money. I’m on a good income now, but I contract so it could all go away at any time with very little warning and basically no severance package, and I live alone so there’s no second income to help out. So I’m ruthlessly stacking every dollar I get into the offset account in case of a rainy day (and to make the most of the low mortgage rates). Currently I’ve paid off or offset almost 50% of the principal. I’ve got a decent but not spectacular super fund stashed away - my first job was in the public sector which had a very generous scheme and I put major voluntary contributions in, which compensated for spending probably a couple of years all up unemployed later on.
If my income continues as is (a big question mark) and if interest rates stay as low as they have been (another big question mark) then I could have the mortgage paid off in as little as 5 years, depending on what unexpected expenses come along. Then i’m faced with the ‘what now?’ question. The house I’m in is not an investment, it’s the place I intend to live in until I’m carried out feet first. Is 45ish too old to be taking out a second mortgage for an IP? Will i even be able to afford an IP then if prices keep increasing (quick answer - no). And it’s anyone’s guess what super rules will be by then.
You could certainly argue that I should be taking a measured risk and borrowing to invest in property now. I could negative gear. My current place has skyrocketed in value since I bought it so could be used as collateral quite easily, and I’ve got a deposit sitting in the offset account if i wanted to use it. I’m just too damn paranoid about the indebtedness and the unreliability of my income stream though.
The people who take out 90%+ LVR loans they can only just afford the repayments on, and simply bet that rates never increase or that their wages outpace rates absolutely boggle my mind. I’d be staying up all night every night doing repayment curves in my head and stressing myself barmy if i was in that boat.
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If you think about every rule change and every time the legislation changed you might come to a better understanding why some of these things take a bit longer to find. Mind you, ask your bank for a statement from 15 years ago and see how long that will take. From an accounting side that can be even harder to obtain than waiting an hour or so.
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At the end of the day you have to do what you are comfortable with. If you feel it good / bad it’s hard to shake. There are lots of ways to spend money to make money, you just need to find what is right for you.
Financial planning has to take into consideration what you are willing to lose as much as what you wish to gain. The answer is generally somewhere in the middle or a rude shock!
We own our home outright, have been debt free for some time and pump everything we can into super pre and post tax. Other than that I have a redundancy payout sitting in the bank earning a pathetic 3%. I should really do something with this, but I’m allergic to debt and uncomfortable with house prices, so an IP is unlikely. Hopefully I won’t regret this like I regret not buying more property in the 90s. We are keen for our daughter to inherit our house, so we won’t downsize even though it’s bigger than our needs. As investors we are massively risk averse so will never be rich and never be broke.
Could you look at a small outlay IP? ■■■■■■ holiday type unit in the country, or small commercial? Less likely to have huge swings in terms of rents (as long as you can get occupancy), smaller total risk, and you could possibly afford to ride out a few years of lower than expected incomes without it being catastrophic.
End of the day, if you own your joint, or even close to it, that’s never going to be a bad thing.
I’ve got a nagging feeling there has to be a correction some time in the next decade.
If houses are unaffordable, why are so many people selling, buying and building.
Very affordable over here.
You make a reasonable point.
And yes, I get that there is no job for a Director of whatever in Dimmy, but there are other options.
Solar panels?
Ducks for cover.
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I’d rather chew my own arms off than live in Dimmy.
Somewhere, Little Timmy is shedding a single tear.
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Having worked in superannuation systems over the past 30 years, including a few of the systems mentioned above, and particularly in migrating from one system to another, one field that’s rarely migrated is total contributions to date because it’s never used in any legislative context.
The last one I worked on had been going since 1990 and the administrators wanted to migrate all transactions. It fell apart because the new system validated every piece of data, and having been written in 2009, didn’t include all the legislative conditions that applied before 2009, particularly the massive change in 2007. This particularly applied to allocated pensions.
They ended up only migrating data from July 2008, and using an opening balance at 30 June 2008.
There was no way they were going to be able to calculate how much a member had contributed, without going back to the original archaic system, and of course, they didn’t want to continue paying licence fees for that system.
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And Merv.