Your super fund should be great at helping you retire. Only eight out of 45 stack up

October 3, 2026 — 5:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

For most of your working life, judging your super fund has been pretty straightforward. You benchmark its performance over 10 years and you check that its fees over the same period aren’t outrageous – and from that you can tell almost everything you need to know.

Because, for the first half of your working life, you probably don’t need to talk to your super fund very often. You need it to invest your money well and not charge you too much for doing it.

But as you get closer to retirement, the job you need your super fund to do changes dramatically. And suddenly, good investment returns and low fees aren’t enough.

You need your fund to help you work out how to turn that big pool of savings into an income you can actually live on. You need to know how much you can safely draw down, and how the age pension might fit into your plans. You might want to consider whether your money should be invested in a product that offers you an income for life, and whether you should invest differently now that you’re spending rather than saving.

And when you go looking for help making those decisions, chances are you’ll start with the super fund you’ve been paying to invest your money all your working life.

Which raises a pretty important question: is your super fund actually any good at retirement?

As you get closer to retirement, the job you need your super fund to do changes dramatically. And suddenly, good investment returns and low fees aren’t enough.

The problem is, our super system has traditionally been much better at helping Australians accumulate money than it has been at helping them spend it upon their retirements. Regulators have known this for years. In 2022 they brought in legislation called the Retirement Income Covenant that required super funds to have a strategy for........

© The Age