Delving into my Super
No not superheros, super as in superannuation or retirement account. You try finding an image for Self Managed Super Funds 
As I wrote last week Australian’s are 1st in the world in our readiness for retirement due to our superannuation system. One option for Australians is to completely manage their own retirement account, namely a Self Managed Superannuation Fund or SMSF for short. I setup our SMSF a few years back and completely manage it myself, except for the mandatory auditing which obviously I am not allowed to perform. With a little research I did find an auditor I was happy with and he charges $330 for the audit, so that is my cost to manage the fund. That’s just background. I wanted to write as every day I hear of another person pulling all their super out of shares. They are utilising the ICSIA portfolio management system, I Can’t Stand It Anymore. I find this very sad and fell compelled to discuss my own super and what I am doing right now.
Today I bought Westpac for our SMSF. While I did not manage to get it at quite as good a price as the Fusion Portfolio did last week, I felt $22.19 was a great price to buy the best positioned Australian bank. Our SMSF is roughly 90% invested in shares, but being in the accumulation phase it has a steady flow of cash every month. Westpac finished up for the day at $23.27. According to news sources the turnaround in the Australian market and hence Westpac was caused by the “stunning” 1% cut.
Australia stunned markets with its steepest interest cut in 16 years on Tuesday and investors expected that other central banks would follow suit in a coordinated move to combat the global credit crisis.
The 1 percentage point reduction in the Reserve Bank of Australia’s benchmark rate was twice as big as expected, underscoring the increasingly strong medicine needed to jolt the world’s financial markets back to health. Reuters
The only part of the story that stuns me is that people were stunned. As I commented at TMF earlier today a concerted international effort bringing a deluge of cheap money was on the cards. Though once again I’m getting sidetracked.
The point of this post is to say that this is not the time to be panicking and selling all your shares. Yes the markets could go lower as I have been writing about, but it is highly unlikley that they are going to keep going straight down. If you have money in shares that you need in the next five years then you’ve got some tough decisions to make and I hope it works out for you.
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