CRAIG SWANGER | from Super Fierce

For any woman who's under the age of 40 right now, their super will be the largest asset they ever own. Most people don't understand that it's their money. They think it's this amazing pool that sits somewhere over there and at some stage they might get some of it. It's always their money. Super Fierce is trying to do is encourage people to take ownership of their own investments.

Craig Swanger is the Investments Guru and co-founder of Super Fierce, a for-purpose company focused on closing the super gap at retirement and empowering Aussie women financially.

Super Fierce is a service that shows you the lowest cost Super account that suits you, saving you many thousands of dollars while you accumulate your retirement money.

$100,000. That’s the approximate amount a typical Australian working today could save in unnecessary super fees by the time they reach retirement, simply by moving to a lower fee fund.

$100,000 more in your super at retirement means around 10-15% more income in retirement (based on the average Aussie).

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Phil (29s):
G'day and welcome back to Shares for Beginners, I'm Phil Muscatello. Women represent half the population, but just a third of the wealth. They start more small businesses than men, but get less in business loans. Women founded businesses get just 4% of venture capital and poorer women are being slugged at three to 4% per annum in total fees in their super joining me today to discuss is Craig Swanger from Super Fierce. G'day Craig, thanks very much for coming on the show. Craig Swanger is the investments guru and co-founder of Super Fierce a for-purpose company focused on closing the super gap at retirement and empowering Aussie women financially. So before we get started into super tell us about your background in capital markets.

Phil (1m 13s):
You've had quite the journey there,

Craig (1m 15s):
Quite the journey. Indeed. In fact, I was trading shares when I was about 11 years old. I managed to get in before the 87 88 downturn snuck in under my mother's account. You're not even allowed to trade shares at that age, but clearly someone had no friends as a young child. Then I wound up in my late twenties at Macquarie Bank, as it was called back. Then now we're quite a group quickly went into the investments area there. And 15 years later when I was the global chief investment officer at Macquarie had an enormous amount of fun, great learning experience and really only left because it was very hard at such a large place Macquarie as it became by that time to invest in early stage, companies grows literally too large to be able to do it took too much time.

Craig (2m 2s):
So I wanted to make more of a difference at the for purpose, social impact end. And so in 2013 left, since then I've been investing in advising setting up various early stage FinTech, largely financial technology companies,

Phil (2m 18s):
Just going back a little bit to the eighties and trading at 11. How did he get so interested at that sort of early age?

Craig (2m 25s):
Clearly complete nerd beyond that? I actually really don't know. My parents had some, some interest in investing in shares there weren't fund managers or anything like that. In fact, dad was in real estate. So maybe it's a bit of an investment blood there somewhere. There's certainly some entrepreneurial DNA there, but I, at some stage during the eighties, got involved in the share market just out of interest or something that my mother and I did together from time to time. And then just got more and more interested. You remember at one stage entrepreneur was a dirty word back in the eighties where there are Ellen bonds and so on

Phil (2m 57s):
The white shoe brigade, wasn't it?

Craig (2m 58s):
Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. And so I got particularly interested in people like Ron Brierley. Unfortunately he's gone the wrong side of the tracks more recently, but the sort of investors who saw value in different companies and went into try and improve those for shareholders, but also for customers and for staff. And that, that was a very early move. And really in those days you had Buffett in the states Brierley, you had one or two in Australia, we were more of the mining ilk. I found that area very interesting and sort of follow that in whole way through high school. And then when I left left university, really, that was my, my first entrance into Macquarie was talking to them about what could be done in that space.

Phil (3m 42s):
Ron Brierley was known as a corporate Raider, wasn't it? Him. And he had a reputation as some people would say, destroyer of companies, but what do you believe he was more of an unlocker of value?

Craig (3m 53s):
Yeah. In his early days? Well, probably not his early days, probably his midlife, my early days, he was very capable and going in and ripping out bureaucracy, ripping me out management and actually focusing back on core product. And if a business was doing two things that just didn't relate to each other, pulling them apart. And yeah, Australia's really missed that in the decades since because companies like Telstra could have been three or four different companies that probably would have been more successful collectively, but for various reasons got kept as one. And unfortunately then what happens is that the bureaucrats take over and the, the weakest common factor in the organization becomes it's mainstream.

Phil (4m 31s):
Let's move forward in your career to the VC companies that you've helped and FinTech. Can you describe a couple of these companies and what they're actually trying to achieve?

Craig (4m 41s):
There's a common theme with all of them that typically would attract me at the start. And then they're looking to do something a bit different. I find it a bit frustrating in FinTech that there's a lot of, there's already 200 robo-advisors so let's have a 201 there's already 300 super funds. So let's have another one, right? There's no need. If you got to use technology to me, it's a waste, unless you can actually use it to improve the outcomes for hopefully the customers of that company and in doing so, improve it for the shareholders as well. That's my belief as technology is more efficient. So if you can cut costs, then two people should be better off the customers and the shareholders. And so that whenever I've joined the company, it's someone who's looking to do something like that.

Craig (5m 25s):
So there's listed entity that I went onto the board of back in 2015, it's now called Wisr limited, incredibly innovative company with a very, very strong leadership team. And most importantly, a vision and that vision was all around. It's actually in personal lending. So they do personal loans. So not what you would call on the surface, a company that's doing good, per se, however, people genuinely need personal loans. And so the doing good part was going, what can we do to really help this person never need a personal loan, but inevitably they're going to, so if they do, they'll choose us because we'd help them before that.

Craig (6m 8s):
So you're doing good and doing well at the same time.

Phil (6m 11s):
So what's the difference between going to a bank say for a personal loan and going to someone like Wisr.

Craig (6m 16s):
There's two main differences. One I think is technology and the other's intent. And it's not that the banks have bad intent it's that they generally lack good intent because they're such large organizations, how can kind of human values permeate through an organization that's tens of thousands of people. So we tend to find with fintechs. The first difference is that the technology makes them more efficient. It's either a more efficient discovery process for the consumer, more efficient application process, more efficient processing or just management that can give them a real economic advantage. But then the second thing needs to be intent that you're going to take that efficiency.

Craig (6m 56s):
And it's going to give something back to the user and keep some for the shareholder.

Phil (7m 1s):
Well, let's move on to superannuation then, which is what Super Fierce is all about. Well, my first question was why does superannuation required demystification? I've been through your FAQ's. And so I thought I'd throw that one straight at you. Let's start a little bit about what super fierce is looking to do in terms of improving the situation for consumers.

Craig (7m 22s):
We focused on improving the outcomes for women. Well, I guess the first point is that men aren't excluded and it's a nuance that we really draw attention to because much of financial services is set up with a very male lifetime experience. Men tend to do their education with includes a uni or not start work. Their income grows over their life or peaks at some stage. And they retire with very few bumps along the way, other than maybe sort of the unfortunate sicknesses or sight for women, much, unlike men, they can start their career knowing almost certainly they're going to have some substantial bumps on the road when it comes to their wealth building, right?

Craig (8m 4s):
If they plan to have kids, hopefully they can. And that'll mean at this time out of the workforce, if they try and have kids and can't for various reasons, there's still some pretty bumpy years there. I've had friends go through that experience. If anyone winds up looking after elderly parents, typically it's the daughter or daughter-in-law who's doing that. So for most women that tends to be a very bumpy road. And while men are homogenous, women are definitely far more nuanced financial services, including superannuation in particular is not set up for that financial services assumes that everything is smooth. So what did we set out to do?

Craig (8m 44s):
We set out to help close the gender wealth gap by focusing firstly on super, quite importantly, that's not where we end at all. We will be moving on to all the other areas that help build wealth, home ownership, small businesses and so on. But we started with super because every working Australian has a superannuation account, probably one of the most common questions that we get asked is do people will say, Hey, I really want to get into investing. And our answer is you already are. Most people don't know that they already have an investment portfolio. And very few people understand that for any woman who's under the age of 40 right now, their super will be the largest asset they ever own, right?

Craig (9m 30s):
For anyone over 40, it used to be your home. But because of the way super, when it was introduced by Keating in the time it's been around. And the fact that there's a much higher percentage going into super anyone under 40 super is now going to be the largest ever financial asset. And it's their money. That's the second thing people don't understand. They think it's this amazing pool that sits over there. And at some stage they might get some of it. It's always their money. It's just locked up to piggybank with no plug on the bottom. You can never get access to it until the government says, you've reached that retirement age and because it's their money and it's their investment portfolio. What we're trying to do is encourage them to take ownership.

Craig (10m 11s):
Now that doesn't mean go and set up an SMSF cause quarter, our beliefs is that, you know, over the longterm, no one, even the best fund manager in the world can beat the market, right? So it's not about managing the money. It's about taking responsibility. The average Australian today working Australian today will pay about $450,000 in superannuation fees over their lifetime. That is the most expensive service you will ever pay for. And yet more than 90% of people would have no idea at all. They probably don't even know they're paying fees because we don't engage in their super until we're 60 and then go on. No, and it's all too late.

Phil (10m 51s):
That's an incredible thing to know about your super and another incredible thing to understand. And this is something that I've only just been understanding myself from doing this podcast is about asset allocation because you see these portfolios that they put in front of you and most people who don't have any background in financial services, don't understand about asset allocation. Don't understand about bonds, real estate, alternative investments, but all of these other things that they're being bucketed into. And I really think that's part of the learning process that people need to do to take ownership of their investments.

Craig (11m 25s):
Absolutely. We focus on fees first, but a lot of people misunderstand that we don't look at performance and actually we do. So what we typically do is we'll start with every fund in the market. We've actually got the only, pretty much the only database that covers every single open super fund. We look at the performance. We eliminate funds that have persistently underperformed. We then eliminate funds that haven't consistently outperformed. We want them good markets and bad markets. Then we look at funds that actually have not just outperformed on, say they're my super account, but also coming back to your point about asset allocation on their funds that have more risky assets and less risky assets and their ethical, sustainable category.

Craig (12m 6s):
We want to see that they outperform on all of their options and out of 300 plus funds in the market, only 18 funds have outperformed over any meaningful period of time, good markets and bad and across all options, 18 out of 300 and something. So we take that group and we then say, great. Now out of that group for our customer that we're dealing with today fulfill, given his balance and his age and his income and his aspirations, which fund is going to result in the lowest fees for the remainder of his working life. So there's low fees within a performance bucket, and that's really where the asset allocation becomes critical because people also will look at, and unfortunately the superannuation industry has not done a good job at explaining that the performance of one fund is not comparable with the performance of another, because just because a fund takes more risk and therefore achieves a better return does not mean it's a better fund.

Craig (13m 10s):
What I want when we adjust for this in our figures is I want a fund that gives me a better return for the same risk or put backwards. As the fund managers will say is better risk adjusted returns, but then basically meant to the same thing, because when you're younger, particularly up to the age of say 40 or 45, you should really be in quite a high risk portfolio where the majority of it's in shares or private equity or property or infrastructure, and very little in bonds and cash. And as you get older, it will, de-risk a little bit, but we're in super for a really long time, 50 years until you retire. And then probably another 20 after that talk about the longterm, it does not get any longer than that.

Craig (13m 50s):
So you really want to be in asset classes. You really want your asset allocation to be taking advantage of that. And you can stomach some ups and downs along the way, go on the shares.

Phil (14m 0s):
I think that's a problem sometimes for younger people is that they, they think, oh, I'm a conservative person. And this portfolio allocation is conservative. That's what I should be putting my super into that. It's not really the case, is it?

Craig (14m 14s):
No, it's not really the case. And I'll get back on my agenda, soapbox and talk about risk profiling. So the risk profiling tools that the industry is not just super funds, but financial advisors as well. It tends to be questions like, okay, you've got $10,000 worth of shares. They fell 15% yesterday. What are you going to do? That question? Couldn't be any less relevant for superannuation if you tried. And it's very numeric and it's very, I beat the market, don't beat the market. And that's what we like to do. That's what men do we like to add before? Look at the school board son. Like how many times have you said that for women, they aren't less of a risk taker. They aren't more risk averse.

Craig (14m 56s):
They just measure risk differently. Women measure risk against a life goal. I want to achieve a life goal. Reduce the risk of me not achieving a life goal. Men will say, I want to outperform the market, right? The stupidity in that statement is, well, if the market went down by 5% of a year, you're saying you'd be happy with only falling by four women don't care. What the market does. They just want to achieve a life outcome. It doesn't make them less of a risk taker, but if you frame the questions relating to a market, you will naturally conclude that women are less risk averse in every study done by actual psychologists, not as finance people have concluded that women are no more or less risk takers than men.

Phil (15m 43s):
While our super scheme is seen as a good way of building wealth. Some cynics point out that it is a gravy train for the financial services industry. And in the view in light of what you said previously, about $450,000 worth of fees, that does sound like a lot of money. What are your thoughts there?

Craig (16m 1s):
I agree with the cynics and I very rarely say that in life because I'll start with where I disagree with the cynics statements around that, which is it's a negative thing to say. So what are you going to do about it? I'm much more about being productive. Okay. So yes, it is a gravy train. Let's come back to that, but don't yell at the government. Don't yell at the superfunds, just do something about it. Go out and find a funded is good value because there are plenty of them around. However, it is a gravy train. So each year Australians pay more than $30 billion to superfunds and face.

Craig (16m 40s):
That's more than we pay either teachers or nurses. So let's say for a second that you can't keep that money. You have to pay that money, but now you've got a choice. Do I pay more to a teacher, more to a nurse or more to super funds other than the superfans themselves, tell me one Australian who would actually choose to keep paying more to super funds, right? So rather than call it cynical, I call it outrage. And the particular outrage is that if they were adding a lot more value for higher phase, then of course that's great because actually then people are making more money. The economy is better off. We can pay people more money. The more you pay for super the worst, the outcome, you cannot name another product or service in which by paying more, I get less across the board.

Craig (17m 26s):
If I pay twice, as much as you do for a car, my car should be twice as bad. It's not always going to be the case. There's definitely exceptions. And when I bought a JAG over the last 30 years, probably feels a bit that way. But across the board, if I pay more, I get more in handbags, in food, in restaurant, in any other service in super our research, the productivity commissions research, Apres research, all point to the same thing, high fees, worse outcomes doesn't mean that low fees gives you better outcomes. That's a misunderstanding, but high fees over and over and over again gives you a worse outcome.

Craig (18m 7s):
So our battle is with fees. $30 billion a year is too much. And it's rising very quickly because of the legislation. So within a few years, it'll be $40 billion a year. Teachers will still be at 22 or 23 billion. Our battle is with high fees and therefore it's with value. At least half of those fees should be eliminated before you're doing any hard work at all. That's just waste.

Phil (18m 33s):
Where are those fees being spent? Where is that money going?

Craig (18m 36s):
I would say there's, there's two good reasons for paying a higher fee. And there's at least a hundred bad reasons. The two good reasons might be active management. And so your active management basically means I'm paying someone to try and beat the market for me. I personally wouldn't do that. I don't believe that you can, you know, Warren Buffett probably the pretty much the number one active manager in the world famously said when he dies, all of his wife's money is going into Vanguard index funds and I'm in his camp, but that's a belief system. That's not a science. So if you believe that active managers can perform, pay for it because you need to hire people for that. That's one good reason. The other reason for fees is administration super is quite complicated.

Craig (19m 18s):
Think of it every fortnight or every month, your super-fan is to collect money from your employer. They have to figure out where it goes to pay some tax, pay some fees, put it into the markets and take it back out again, report to you. There's work to be done there. The more you pay for administration, doesn't give you better administration. Typically it's actually just, you should still pay less, but it's a decent reason for some phase. The bad reasons pay more for the same is obviously a very bad reason. And typically that comes from layering, which means. So for example, in Australia today, you can invest your money in the Vanguard growth index fund. That's where it ultimately goes into the markets.

Craig (19m 57s):
However, you can pay nearly 2% per annum for that. Or you can pay as low as 0.3% per annum for that. And what are you getting exactly the same thing, minus more fees. And that's because there'll be the Vanguard growth index fund is where it winds up. But then just beneath that, there'll be some kind of red platform. And just beneath that, there's an administration platform. You want it with layering fund of funds, someone with a sub manager to many people in the gravy chain creates phase. That's a bad reason to me, the Vanguard growth index product invested indexes. There's still something underneath them. If I'm going to invest in that index, regardless of how many phases of pile on the way I'm still getting index.

Craig (20m 38s):
So find me the cheapest way to get that index, like say Hostplus index balance or Hesta's index balance. There's at least 20 of them that are very, very low for in index balanced funds. And then the other one that is as a significant cause for higher fees, that's not valid is great. It's not actually about for-profit or not-for-profit, that's a bit of a red herring just because you're collecting a profit, doesn't make you any more or less greedy. Some of the not-for-profits spend their money on things that aren't really for members famously over the last few years. We've seen evidence of that. So greed is always bad. It's not for members. There's a bad example.

Phil (21m 15s):
The other aspect of super is that you've bucketed into insurance products as well, and they opt out. You don't even know sometimes that you've got an insurance product in years. Superannuation. What are your thoughts on insurance in super

Craig (21m 30s):
Look? I think let's start with whether insurance is necessary and for a hell of a lot of people. It is. It's a very, very important asset to own because you never know just like any other insurance, you don't buy car insurance because you're expecting to have a crash. You don't buy life insurance because you were expecting to die. It's to cover the consequences. Insurance through super has its positives and its negatives. Its positives are that it tends to be quite tax efficient because it's a tax deduction to the Superfund. So there's a small benefit there. And you can't claim a tax deduction when you pay for a life insurance outside of super, it tends to be a lower cost service because they do what's called group insurance. They take thousands and thousands of people who are similar and therefore get a bulk buying discount.

Craig (22m 15s):
And then that's one of the negatives of group insurances. If you're not part of the pack, there's something a bit different about you. It could be a preexisting medical condition or a nuanced personal environment like divorce. And there's some reason why the group insurance just doesn't work for you. And you want something that's more tailored. That's when you'd go for retail insurance. So I'd answered the question in two ways. Is insurance important? Yes. For a lot of people, yes. Is insurance through super important? It's efficient. It's certainly not a bad idea. And if I didn't know anything about someone, I would say, well, don't get rid of it, but it depends on your personal circumstances is one of the hardest areas for advisors to deal with because it is so deeply, deeply personal.

Craig (22m 57s):
You can opt out. Most people don't understand they're paying for insurance through their super. The worst thing you can do is pay for insurance through two super funds. For most of us, we only get to die once. So there's only one payout there. So you really don't want to have to, or rather than even opt out. The first thing they need to really do is go off. I'm going to pay for it. Am I actually getting insurance? That's worthwhile, like, you know, I've got a one and a half million dollar mortgage, so there'll be no point in having $80,000 worth of life insurance. What's the point of that? I'm going to have it and I might as well right-size and get the best value out of it.

Phil (23m 30s):
So someone listening to this podcast, when they first go to Super Fierce to find out a bit more about what you're offering, what will they be presented with?

Craig (23m 38s):
The thing though is it's a very different experience. And I should actually start by saying while the public profile me as the co-founder of Super Fierce, actually the vision of my wife trying to probate. And so she set this up off a conversation that we were having one day, clearly we need to get a life, get some friends because we were talking about Super fees, no waste on a weekend. And she took that conversation and shared it with some friends of hers and found that they were all very concerned about their super, because they hadn't done enough about it. And they didn't feel like they had the information or the capability to do anything about it. And that's really what we've set out to address, right?

Craig (24m 20s):
We want firstly, for people to understand that investing, including your super is entirely intuitive. It's made far too complicated by people in the industry using lots and lots of jargon. And they do that to be able to justify their face like the it sector does like so many different sectors to then make it complicated. You go, it's all too hard to believe what you're saying and pay you. The money investing is actually very, very simple. And so we start with that and we, I don't like the word education because it's a bit condescending prefer to talk about it as being empowerment and give them access to the information that just lets them know enough that they can be confident to then go and seek advice or ask.

Craig (24m 60s):
When they ask friends about something and they get the answer, they can actually understand and feel confident in making a decision. And if you feel confident in making decision, you're probably going to engage and actually make decisions. And that is the critical thing. If you don't make the changes to your super in particular at an earlier age, every day, every week, every month, that passes after that costs you money. If I said to you, here's a time machine, you can go back 10 years and tell a 10 year younger self, give them a special stock tip. And that'll mean for the rest of your life. Now you'll earn a thousand dollars a month more without any extra work, no sane person would refuse that offer.

Craig (25m 44s):
And yet that's exactly what we're doing. We're saying have a look at your super don't waste your money on phase. Do something about it early enough. And if you do, the odds are strongly in your favor that when you hit retirement, you're going to have something around a thousand dollars a month, more to spend for the rest of your life. Now it takes work to change your super there's, all this talk around. I just click here. If you click here on the consolidate super here or change switch super here, buttons that sit everywhere. There's plenty of disclaimers that sit on that for good reason. And the biggest risks you really face are things like you'll go into the default fund option, which may be have too little or too much risk, or you might actually prefer to go into an ethical fund.

Craig (26m 29s):
It will just put you into the standard fund. Your insurance benefits could be lost and switched because it just turns off the old insurance and tries to turn on new ones. But there's no guarantee the new fund will accept your insurance and the paperwork and the inefficiency of the super industry will blow your mind. You think it's tough dealing with government, try dealing with super funds and they managed to lose an account disappear for a while. It always shows up in the end because the ATO also has records. But the switch process is very, very long and tedious. And so we always say, look, engage early. Yes, it's going to be hard work, but a thousand dollars a month for the rest of your life. Once you retire, surely that's worth a little bit of work right now, but if not pay us to do it for you, there's a very, very long answer to a short question.

Craig (27m 17s):
Sorry. The experience that people have when they join us is one, they'll find it's very non-financial services, very intuitive. Two they'll find it's empowering three. They'll get a statement of advice at no cost with no hang ups, no hooks, no follow up hardcore marketing. We hand that to people because we've created this in a digital environment. It doesn't actually cost us much at all to prepare that advice. And it's pretty much instant. So we're able to do that at no cost because we want people to make a change. We then say to them, make the change. And if you're not going to make the change, don't lie to yourself. A lot of people.

Craig (27m 57s):
So I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. And we find out a year later, they haven't because they come back and say, ah, sorry. So either make the change or get us to do it for you. And we'll do things like we have this thing called the procrastinator calculator where we'll literally calculate for you every month that you wait before making the change has costs 67 year old. You this much per week. How do you feel about that? Because we're trying to get people to actually do something for themselves importantly. And you'll see this all over our website and statement of advice. We're not paid by any fund in any way. There's no advertising, there's no commissions, there's no insurance kickbacks, which makes us, we're allowed to say the word independent as an unbiased, as a result.

Craig (28m 41s):
And oddly, that's quite rare in the Australian environment. It's very unusual. You can find those sort of advisors these days. And it's a cultural thing we set up right from the start. And it means that people can then be confident that the information they're getting is in their best interest, whether they do anything with it, that's their call.

Phil (28m 59s):
So you're just basically simply providing the wherewithal to put yourself into the place where it's going to work the best for you. Is that what it boils down to here?

Craig (29m 7s):
Exactly. And then the advice will say here's our recommended fund. And our recommended fund will always be the lowest fee fund for you because importantly, the lowest fee fund for you will be different to me in different to trainer in different everyone else. There's so many different fees and super, they act on us in different ways, but with our advice will always be out of these fierce performing funds. The lowest fee fund for you is what we recommend. However, we will always also show a comparison to an ethical, sustainable investment option, particularly with women we're finding more and more that there's a very high degree interest in investing in that way. So we also then go, look, we won't recommend this because we need to give you advice in your best interests.

Craig (29m 48s):
We don't really know how strong this desire is of yours to invest in that way. But we're going to show you a comparison that is the lowest fee fund in the strong performers that has an option for ethical and sustainable. Put those two funds next to each other, recommend this, by the way, here's this, when you get to the end of that, you can go. Great. Thanks for the advice. Appreciate that. I now get to choose which of these are investing click on one of those and then say, I'll do it myself, or please do it for me. And that's the experience into end.

Phil (30m 21s):
And you don't specifically bar men from this service at all. Do you?

Craig (30m 25s):
Okay. So if I were sitting at about 18% men and by and large, they are husbands and boyfriends that were told to do it

Phil (30m 33s):
In no uncertain terms

Craig (30m 35s):
With the usual strength that are, that the statement has given, but usually they come in after or at the same time. And increasingly we're finding actually men engaging very deeply in strategies along the lines of there's a significant gap that's created in a woman's retirement balance when she has kids. So what we're trying to encourage is more and more that the other parts of the family chip in to the super that stage and not just, oh, well, while you're taking time off work, I'll share my super with you. That won't make a big difference. It's more like actually, while you're on maternity leave, all of my Subaru will go to your now we're closing the gap or Hey, mum wants some grandkids, great mom, that's wonderful.

Craig (31m 17s):
Put $5,000 into my super. Now when I'm in my early twenties. So by the time I'm in my thirties and have kids I've closed the gap. And that's where we're finding men and fathers in particular really engaging has been, it's very encouraging to say, as soon as they know, they can do something about it, they do something that they don't want to help. They just don't know where to start.

Phil (31m 36s):
Yep. And the industry is set up in such a way that it's not making it obvious how people can start and get help.

Craig (31m 41s):
Yeah. They're getting better at sort of promoting strategies. I mean, no, what is it now? 28th of June, we'll see soon, or probably just saying a whole bunch of strategies hit the newspapers saying this is what you can do with your super around this time of year. That's good. So the strategies are getting better, but the effort of doing that is enormous. So for example, one of the traps, one of the things that we manage for customers, if you make voluntary contributions, additional contributions to your super, and if you change super funds, which of course all of us do at some stage during our lives. If you don't fill in the right paperwork before changing funds, then the tax benefits that you get for making voluntary contributions are lost forever.

Craig (32m 25s):
Now why on earth is that a feature of our superannuation system, but it is. And the implications can be thousands and thousands of dollars just wasted in taxation because of basically what's a fault in the super system. That's why, when we talk about you can do the switch yourself, just be aware of all the hooks that sit there and make sure you follow through this process.

Phil (32m 49s):
Super Fierce charges, a sliding scale based on your super balance, is that correct?

Craig (32m 54s):
I'll answer it in two ways and say, yes, it wasn't. No, it's not. So depending on when we go to air, but in the next three days, the fee will change to a very flat fee. That's basically a dollar a day. So 365 is the annual fee. If you do the switch through us and that's the set fee, but it comes with a range of subscription benefits as well on the sort of education engagement material. And if you stay as a customer, then we're constantly, we're doing health checkups, checking. You have life insurances at the right level, making sure that new funds haven't shown up there might actually be better for you. And checking in to make sure that, you know, if you were doing voluntary contributions to try and close the gap, when you choose to have kids or seven new business, that you're stuck on that track.

Phil (33m 38s):
Fantastic. So tell us where listeners can find out more information.

Craig (33m 41s):
superfierce.com.au Is the best place to go. And the experience is very simple from there. There's a very simple chat function you go through right at the start. There's no obligations literally all the way through until after you've received the advice.

Phil (33m 55s):
Fantastic. Craig's Warringah. Thank you very much for joining me today.

Craig (33m 59s):
Thanks very much.

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