Need help setting up Australian superannuation contributions

Unknown

I'm trying to set up an Australian superannuation account using US Quicken 2017 (not AU Reckon, which costs an arm and a leg). Does anyone out there have experience doing this?

The basic idea is that a superannuation fund is like a complex pension fund into which both employers and employees make contributions at a (usually) concessional tax rate, and it can operate more or less like a mutual fund depending on how it's set up.

In my case, what I want to be able to do is (I'll try to make this as clear and simple as I can!):

1) set up a single brokerage account with two "securities": one which is called a "defined benefit division", and which I would basically operate as a money market fund (it's much more complicated than that, but never mind), and the other of which is called an "accumulation component", and would basically operate like a mutual fund.

2) set up my paycheck so that pre-tax deductions can be routed into one or the other fund

One problem I'm having now is that the pre-tax deductions all go into the account's cash balance as a single lump sum (in other words, the two paycheck deductions are being combined into a single deposit). This means that I need to enter two more transactions manually to "buy shares" from the account's (nonexistent in reality) cash balance. Is there a smarter way to do this?

(Another and more difficult problem is that I can't track changes in the account value due to market fluctuations, since my superannuation fund only publishes balances, not shares or prices per share. Currently, my rough-and-ready way of dealing with this is just to change the account's opening cash balance periodically to make the total account value match the reported value - but this of course is not ideal.)

Very grateful for any assistance, particularly in items 1 and 2.

Cheers

Unknown

Incidentally, I did consider creating two independent single-mutual-fund accounts. I think that this would work, but it doesn't seem ideal.

mshiggins

Does the Australian version handle this in a more automated fashion?

q_lurker

If your two paycheck entries are getting combined into the one account entry, I think your read on that is correct.  You have to either provide the two separate 'buys' in the one account or go the two SMF account directions which would automate the buys.  I would stick with the first option.  I have a bias against the SMF accounts and would prefer the one-account direction..  

You probably could create a memorized group of investment transactions to do the two buys, but I can't imagine that would really save you much.  If the amounts are repetitive from paycheck to paycheck, you can probably ease things a bit by copying and pasting the two transactions (one at a time).  With the paste, you would just need to edit the date field.  

As to the value updates, and assuming those are reported as two separate values for the two components, I think I would gravitate to using a pattern of Add Shares (and possibly in bad times, Remove Shares) to represent those total value changes.  That is assuming you are keeping the price per share of the two component 'funds' at $1/share.  

HTH

Jim_Harman

For the accumulation component, I think this will approximate what is going on behind the scenes. This assumes that your new contributions are reasonably small compared to the account balance and the share price does not fluctuate wildly.

Say your last statement says you have $123,000. You might set it up with 1,000 shares at $123 each and no cash as of that date. Let your payroll contributions accumulate in cash. When you get a new statement, "buy" enough shares just before the end of the period at the last statement's price to use up the cash, then make an entry in the price history for the new statement date so that the account balance matches your statement.

If you go the two account route, you probably don't want single mutual fund accounts but regular accounts, which can also hold cash.