Time to find your lost super?

Australians tracked down $860 million in lost super in just three months—are you interested in doing the same?

You wouldn’t maintain two bank accounts, two home loans or two insurance policies without good reason. But when it comes to your retirement savings, for too many of us over the years it’s been a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

It’s all too easy to allow a new superannuation account to be opened when you change employers and then forget about bringing your super together. While it may be that you’ve deliberately maintained more than one account to take advantage of specific benefits, if you’re like many Australians you’ve ended up paying multiple sets of fees and charges because you haven’t got around to taking action.

Protecting Your Super reforms

The good news is that from 1 July 2019 government reforms are kicking in, designed to make sure that members are not paying for insurance cover that they do not know about, or paying premiums and other fees that inappropriately diminish their retirement savings.

• Fees will be capped at 3% pa for accounts with $6,000 or less at year end.
• There will be no more exit fees to leave or change your super fund.
• Super providers will need to cancel the insurance in any super account that’s considered inactive. An inactive account is any account that hasn’t received any contributions or rollovers for more than 16 months. Before taking action, your super provider must tell you that you’re at risk of having your insurance cancelled and give you the opportunity to choose to keep your insurance.
• And super accounts with low balances will be automatically transferred to the Australian Taxation Office. But that’s only if your balance is below $6,000 at year end. And only for inactive super accounts.

So while it’s a positive step to help Australians save more for retirement, it’s no excuse not to take control of your own destiny.

Taking control of your retirement savings

It’s never been easier to sort out your super, as an increasing number of Australians are finding out. In the three months to December 2018, more than 66,000 people found and consolidated over 105,000 accounts worth more than $860 million from October to December 2018 using the ATO’s myGov service¹.

But this still leaves over $17.5 billion in lost or unclaimed super. If you think you might have lost or unclaimed super, and you happen to be an AMP customer, we can do the legwork for you, free of charge.

Alternatively, log in or create a myGov account, or contact your previous employers to find out which super funds they may have paid contributions to on your behalf.

As always you’ll need to take your personal situation into account when deciding whether to bring your super together into one account. Closing super accounts means you may lose insurance within super so it’s important to know exactly what you’re losing and what you’re gaining before making any decisions.

To help you better weigh up the pros and cons of consolidating, you might like to speak to your financial adviser. If you don’t have one but are after some advice, you can call AMP on 131 267 or use our find an adviser search function.

^{1 https://www.ato.gov.au/Media-centre/Media-releases/Finding-super-sparks-$860-million-worth-of-joy/}