Consolidating superannuation is critical to boosting your retirement savings

YOUR hard-earned cash could be sitting in the $16 billion pot of lost super held by the tax office but it is easy to reclaim with a few clicks of the mouse.

Help yourself to $16B in lost savings

There are more than 6.1 million lost and unclaimed super accounts worth about $16 billion waiting to be clawed back, Australian Taxation Office figures show.

If you have one of these accounts you could be missing out on a valuable savings pot and wasting hundreds of dollars a year in fees.

The ATO’s assistant commissioner John Shepherd says in many cases having multiple accounts is simply “a waste of money.”

“We are not forcing people to have one account but to look at the number of accounts you have and try and minimise the amount,’’ he says.

“Over a person’s lifetime, people start to accumulate accounts, when they are quite young they are working different jobs, so over a lifetime that could add up to as much as $10,000 on each excess account.’’

There are approximately 35 million accounts in the Australian super system (this figure includes lost and unclaimed super accounts) worth $1.9 trillion.

Of these 35 million accounts:

· 1.4 million super accounts are lost (still with super funds) worth $13.4 billion.

· 4.6 million accounts are unclaimed (held by the ATO) worth $2.5 billion.

But it is easy to fix with just a few simple clicks of the mouse.

Set up a MyGov account and then visit the ATO website and use the link to the ATO’s online services to track down and consolidate any lost or unclaimed super.

Cashing in ... You could find thousands of dollars of lost super and save a fortune in fees by following a simple online process.

Lauren Barker, 28, consolidated multiple super accounts last year, pooling tens of thousands of dollars together which significantly reduced the amount she was paying in fees.

“I knew I had super in different super funds from different jobs and every time I went to consolidate if felt too hard, there were too many forms to fill out,’’ she says.

“But I finally contacted my fund and then consolidated all my accounts electronically for me, this included four accounts with more than $30,000 in total.”

Consolidating is done electronically and rollover should take just three days to be completed.

SunSuper figures show 25 per cent of their members have consolidated accounts and the average rollover was about $19,300.

The fund’s rollovers have increased by 60 per cent since 2011 — this has been mainly fuelled by the ease of doing it all online as opposed to juggling paperwork.

The fund’s manager of comprehensive financial advice Evan Poole says it’s important Australians consolidate their retirement saving accounts.

“We recently had a member who had 24 other super funds, think about the amount of paperwork they would have had,’’ he says.

“Consolidating is convenient, people can do it at home in their own time.

“It’s absolutely vital we look at our superannuation and take an active interest in it because that’s the only way it grows.”

Visit moneysaverHQ for more tips and ways to save.