No set profile for SMSF trustees

There is no definitive profile for people who choose to establish a self-managed super fund (SMSF), according to those providing advice into the sector.

Commenting on the debate about where SMSF trustees usually come from, Super Concepts technical manager Graeme Colley acknowledged that while both industry funds and retail master trusts may feel particularly hard done by when it comes to SMSF setups, new trustees can come from any sector.

“New SMSF trustees and members come from all sorts of funds,” he said. “As people are retiring, they’re seeing that they’ve got enough accumulated in their fund and so, whether it’s a corporate fund or a retail or an industry fund, they’re transferring their money into the self-managed funds that they now find better suit their needs.

“If you talk to one sector like the industry funds or the retail funds, they’ll tell you that they’re being picked on and that all their losses are to self-managed funds. But from what we see, SMSF setups don’t distinguish between one and the other.”

Suggesting that the decision to set up an SMSF was far more related to the potential trustee’s personal circumstances than to the superannuation sector they had previously been serviced by, Matrix Financial Planning managing director Rick Di Cristoforo said that the only common theme he had seen emerging was education and understanding.

“Ear to the ground and trends-wise, its likely to be those middle-aged accumulators that are educated enough to understand the industry but have so far not actually taken control of their own superannuation fund,” he said. “And I’ll give you an example. Personally, I’ve only just taken on an SMSF myself and the reasons for that have no relationship to the sector in which my superannuation was previously held.

“It’s simply because an event happened, a transaction’s happened, it was in my benefit and my adviser said: ‘Why don’t you do it?’”