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Growing retirement anxiety is driving more Australians toward self-managed pension funds, where investors are embracing greater control and pursuing higher returns through crypto and other alternative assets.
While such do-it-yourself vehicles aren’t unique to Australia—the UK has Self-Invested Personal Pensions, and employer-managed 401(k) plans in the US generally let savers choose from a list of mutual and index funds—a defining feature of an SMSF is that holders typically act as trustees, directly managing their own investments. A majority of Australia’s individual investors still keep their retirement money in conventional, tightly regulated and professionally managed institutional superannuation funds, often called super funds—a market worth about A$3.3 trillion—but wobbly markets and growing investor impatience have driven a shift into SMSFs, with total balances jumping by more than 40% over the past five years, according to Australian Taxation Office (ATO) data.
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