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Hi, I’m Grant Abbott and I’m chairman of the Australian SMSF Members Association
or ASMA for short. I want to talk to you today about how to establish a self-managed super
fund. We’re now almost approaching 500,000 self-managed super funds in Australia and
many more people are asking us on our website, how do we go about setting up one of these
funds? Let me give you the simple details.
The first one and foremost, we need to work out who is going to be the Trustee of our
self-managed super fund. All members must be Trustees and we can either act as individual
Trustees, or alternatively we can have a company and all the directors will then be members
of the superannuation fund. So either have individuals or a company trustee, we establish
that first.
The second stage is we need to then get a trust deed or a set of rules, and it’s important
to understand that with a self-managed super fund or the laws that relate to superannuation,
they effectively tell you what you can’t do. The trust deed is the real set of rules
that actually tells you what you can do. You need to make sure you get the best trust deed
in the market. Certainly don’t scrimp and save and cut back strategies simply to save
a few dollars up front.
Once we have that all established we then need to get an ABN, we then need to get a
tax file number, and then virtually we’re in business. The next thing is to then establish
a cash account, whether it’s a Macquarie CMT, an ANZ V2 account, a Westpac account
or NAB account to actually operate all transactions through there.
Following that, what we need to do is then start to get some money in and that could
be employer contributions, SGC, it could be salary sacrifice contributions or it could
be rollover from other funds such as industry funds or retail superannuation funds or even
another self-managed super fund. Once we then go ahead and we effectively put our money
into the fund, it’s time to sit down and invest, so what we do is we build an investment
strategy. That investment strategy says, well this is where we are taking our self-managed
super fund, and from there we monitor our investments, we look at all the strategies
that are possible, we keep ourselves educated and then we’re off building this wonderful
self-managed super fund, that if we’ve done it right, spent that time up front – look
and get a good advisor if that’s absolutely necessary – if we do it up front and get
it right, it’s going to last us the test of time, at least 40, 50, 60 years, possibly
if you do it well, it’s going to last 100 years. Anyway, it’s Grant Abbott discussing
how to set up a self-managed super fund. I’m signing off.