This morning's Courier Mail had an interesting article about superannuation.

It said that 80% of Australian have their superannuation parked in the 'default' option of their superannuation fund.

What that means is that most funds have three or four different investment mixes.  'Conservative', 'Balanced' and 'Growth' would be three common choices.  If, when you set up your superannuation fund, you don't make a choice you will end up with a pre determined default option - usually the 'balanced' fund.

It suprises me that 80% of people are simply in that default option.  Superannuation is your own money - take the time to invest it in the manner that is best going to suit your own situation.  Don't leave it to the fund to decide what is best for you!

This is particularly true of people close to retirement, where quite often the default option will revert to a 'conservative' or 'cash' type investment option.  For people for who this happened in the last 5 years, this would have cost them thousand and thousand of retirement dollars in missed returns from growth assets like shares and property.  This is a real worry - people close to retirement are still looking at a 30 to 40 year investment time frame.  You need your portfolios to be exposed to growth assets to provide the sort of investment returns that will allow you to enjoy retirement.

Don't leave it to Mr or Mrs 'Default' to make investment decisions for you!

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