How to ask your super fund to put investments into cash September 6th, 2024
How do you ask the super fund to ‘set up’ the ‘cash bit’?
What you say sounds sensible, but when you look at the fund mix, there is no obvious way to ask them to ’put some in a cash option, outside of the general conservative fund mix which has a component of cash?”
Can I get my question answered?
It’s probably easiest if we try and explain this using an example. Let’s say your fund was worth $329,000 at the start of the year and is now worth $349,000, or an increase of $20,000 over the past 8 months. You decide to move the $20,000 “profit” to cash as per our suggestion.
To do this, you will need to log in on your super fund member’s web site.
Next, select the tab dealing with investments and under that, you should see an option to change investments.
There should be an option do “dial-your-own” mix.
When you select this link, you will be presented with a range of investment options and an ability to allocate your total super fund balance between those options. In some cases, this could be a dollar amount and in others, a percentage allocation. In your case, $20,000 of the current $349,000 is 5.7 percent so rounding it up to 6 percent makes sense.
On the screen, the new allocation would be “Conservative” 94 percent and “Cash” 6 percent totalling 100 percent. That same screen or another screen dealing with “payment options” will allow you to indicate the order that investments are cashed-in to meet your regular payments.
With your now modified mix, you would select 1 against “Cash” and 2 against “Conservative”.
That means the fund will use up the cash units first and then move to the conservative units to meet your payments.
The trick will be to repeat this process once or twice per year to gather future profits and replenish the cash pool. If the market is down at the time, you simply wait for it to recover and then repeat your profit-taking move then.