Retirement saving in Australia

March 14, 2019 — April 6, 2025

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Assumed audience:

Me. These are my own notes on finance, for me. Nothing here is financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. Use information here at your own peril.

The main Government-incentivised retirement savings is the superannuation system.

1 Superannuation tax contribution optimisation

Figure 1

There’s a calculator if you’re too lazy or have a low net worth for an accountant: Super contributions optimiser. Keyword: “Salary sacrifice”, “packaging”.

2 ESG investing

I’m not going to weigh in on the effectiveness of ethical investing to do good in the world. That’s an interesting question, but out of scope here.

Strict pro-social superannuation/retirement funds in Australia include Australian Ethical and Future Super (the former includes a referral code). More relaxed ESG priorities are claimed by other funds, e.g. AustralianSuper. Other funds run ESG sub-funds, although I forgot to write those down, so google them yourself.

Wholesale Fees for Australian Ethical’s managed funds are reasonable if you have AUD25K or meet some other criterion to be a “wholesale” investor. On the downside, their portfolio reporting is really bad. Other funds let me download a CSV, which is not a guaranteed tax record but good enough to feed into my accounting software. Australian Ethical claims this is my accountant’s responsibility. Expect to spend much time transcribing their PDFs into a spreadsheet for tax compliance purposes or hunting for annoying Excel download buttons.

Sustainalytics provides reports on the impact of various investments.

3 DIY superannuation

In Australia, by default, the investment strategy used by a typical superannuation fund is unremarkable.

If I want more control, I can set up a self-managed super fund (SMSF) or a Small APRA fund, or a normal fund with a member-directed investment option. Here are some unaudited links on each.

Any of these give more control over the investment strategy than the default. Note I don’t necessarily want to be doing stock picking in my daily investments; I’m too busy, and my job is not active trading. But I do want to adopt a different risk posture than these folks seem to. I’d probably like to put some fixed proportion of my superannuation into a “conservative” fund and then invest the rest in high-risk options based on my insights. In these apocalyptic times, having some of my retirement savings in high-risk, hail-mary options actually seems reasonable.

3.1 Member direct

The “DIY” options in super funds have a more limited scope; in particular, the ones I’ve seen seem to only offer a controlled set of ASX-listed shares and ETFs, and not other asset classes such as real estate or private equity, or international shares.

Acclaim Wealth seems to be an outlier in this regard, with lots of flexibility, IPOs, etc., but they are coy about how you join. UPDATE: I phoned them up, and I have to go through my financial adviser to join. At that point, I assume I may as well just run my own SMSF.

High flexibility fancy options from institutions I’ve heard of include:

There’s a longer list at

3.2 Self-managed funds

Many small links on a complicated thing I’m trying to sort out

3.3 Software