The Productivity Commission released its draft report, “Superannuation: Assessing efficiency and competitiveness”, a few weeks ago and while most of the reporting has centred on the larger funds regulated by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), there was a small amount of content about SMSFs.

The 2018 federal budget has now been handed down and we can all breathe a sigh of relief there were no massive changes to the superannuation sector this year. Instead the measures announced could be considered as system fine-tuning around the edges. Yet for SMSFs there were two really significant announcements. One was the ability […]

Back in May last year I wrote an editorial that suggested the politicians of this country hated SMSFs. At the time I came to this conclusion on the back of the new rules applying to limited recourse borrowing arrangements and how targeted they were to penalising this particular sector of the superannuation industry.

In the normal course of my job I have to attend just about every presentation regarding superannuation, whether it is specific to SMSFs or not.

In recent weeks we have witnessed a rather significant share market correction both in the United States and Australia. Naturally this is not a pleasant occurrence, but is sometimes a necessary phenomenon if markets are to be priced accurately. But the subsequent media coverage of these market falls always interests and frustrates me. Without fail […]

Ever since the Turnbull government handed down its bombshell superannuation reforms on 3 May 2016 as part of that year’s budget, we’ve all been hoping the implementation of some of the measures would end up a little less complicated than initial assessments had predicted.

The latest buzz in financial services circles in the past few weeks has been the announcement of a royal commission into the banks.

Well, what a surprise. After denial after denial the government finally acknowledged how unpopular its original proposed changes to the superannuation system were and eventually had to water them down.

When I began publishing selfmanagedsuper Trustee News, one of the missions I set myself was to cut through the unhelpful noise reverberating around the industry about the SMSF sector.