The Origin of The Smart Super List

It was early 2017 and I was frustrated. I had just finished reading the first few chapters of Tony Robbins’ book, Money Master the Game, that talked about how people are getting short changed out of their retirement nest eggs because of the exorbitantly high fees that they were paying to invest their money. But that wasn’t what I was frustrated about. What was frustrating was that there was no easy way to do anything about it. What I was looking for was a website or online article showing me which superannuation funds that invested in low-fee index funds while also charging low fees themselves. My own superannuation fund at the time was charging 1.15% so I wanted to find a fund that offered a better deal. Given that all Australian employees have superannuation funds of some type and with the surge in popularity of index funds, it should’ve been pretty easy to find this kind of information from a simple Google search right? Wrong. Finding this information took hours and days to track down. I had to look through website after website, articles, top-10 lists, forums. After getting the data I was looking for, I had to integrate and organise it in a way that I could compare funds like-for-like, apples-to-apples. Finally, after all those hours of research, I finally rolled over my super to a fund that offered a lower fee and had the asset allocation I was looking for.

After going through this experience, I thought to myself, “It would’ve been so much easier if there had a been a website with all this information. It would’ve saved me so much time, energy, and frustration”. And that’s pretty much how the idea of this website began. I thought, “Why don’t I build it? Why don’t I build the website that I wish had existed when I needed it?” And even though I’d been a professional Web Programmer my whole working life (at the time of writing this, that's about 14 years, including 4 years for companies in the finance industry), I had never built a website of my own from scratch. I knew it would be a challenge and would take a lot of work, but I was determined to learn what I needed to know on how to launch a website to share what I had learned. I wanted to build a one-of-a-kind, free, accurate, up-to-date, unbiased resource created for purpose of helping other Australians save time and effort in finding superannuation funds that invest in low-fee index-funds. You can think of it as the table of contents of a book about low-fee superannuation funds. Simple, concise, and what you need to get to the information that’s relevant and important to you.

I do my best to ensure the information on this website is kept up-to-date and accurate. I hope that you find the information valuable and helpful. If you do please, I only ask that you please share it with anyone else you think may also benefit from this resource. And if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to make this site serve you better, please feel free to leave a message at feedback@thesmartsuperlist.com.