New research has revealed what Australians need in their super as their age in order to enjoy a comfortable retirement.
By the age of 30, finance experts suggest people should have their yearly income in savings (including superannuation) of $70,944.
By 40, people should have three times their income saved and with the average salary for Australians in their 40s roughly $71,136, savings should be sitting at $213,408 including super.
For those in their mid 50s, the average Australian income drops to $63,432 so they are expected to have six times their salary – approximately $380,592 saved, including superannuation.
They should also be saving 20 per cent of their gross income each year ($12,686) and have 12 to 24 months of emergency savings in the bank at all times.
Does this sound like you? Not if you savings are sitting in a so called “dud’ fund.
Working Australians will soon be told if their retirement nest eggs are sitting in a “dud” super fund, thanks to the government’s recently introduced sweeping changes in the superannuation industry.
All super funds will now face an annual performance test and public ranking by the Tax Office as part of Your Future, Your Super package reforms passed by Parliament last week.
This means that trustees for underperforming funds, will be forced to “fess up” and notify their members that their retirement funds are held in a “dud” product. Members have to be notified by October 1.
“If the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority declares a super fund to have failed its performance test, it’s likely to be a death sentence,” Rainmaker director of research, Alex Dunnin told the Australian Financial Review.
The AFR has estimated that there at least 23 default products across 21 different super funds that could face the ignominy of being “publicly labelled” as an underperformer, according to data compiled from APRA’s super fund heat map.
A super product that has underperformed its six-year investment benchmark by more than 50 basis points in the APRA date, could be listed as a potential underperformer.
The 23 products collectively hold about $160 billion in assets across 3.3 million member accounts according to AFR.
The list could include small fund such as Toyota Super which has fewer than 3000 members in its default product and possibly industry heavyweight, REST which manages more than 1.5 million default super accounts, said AFR.
Slightly more than half of the underperforming products are managed by a for-profit retail fund and the worst performer is the union-linked Maritime Super.
Many funds have lowered their fees since APRA’s “heat map” was released in December.
Mr Dunnin said that it was a good move to put super fund performance to the test but cautioned that details of the test must be right.