It’s a rare thrill to log onto your superannuation fund account to discover that 80 per cent of your retirement savings have vanished.
Gushes of adrenaline, panic and suppressing expletives were just some of the sensations I felt on June 28 after finding my transition-to-retirement account and its six-figure balance had disappeared.
The anxiety has continued as I try to penetrate super fund information barriers, nervously accept reassurances about my missing retirement savings and, hopefully, get them back under my control some later this week
Right now, I am on a steep learning curve about the joys and pitfalls of myGov and related SuperStream processes designed to make it easy to consolidate our super savings.
It’s a harsh reminder for us to regularly do online checks and double-checks of our superannuation accounts when we are moving our savings around — or going anywhere near the squillions rushing through SuperStream.
While the cause is still unclear, my current plight appears to be linked to one of several visits to myGov in mid-June.
These visits were to manage some end of financial year contributions and to use SuperStream to close an expensive retail super fund account that held $46,627 of my retirement savings.
The myGov app clearly showed this retail fund account plus my accumulation and TTR accounts with the industry fund.
With a couple of clicks by me on myGov on June 16, I generated a SuperStream order for the retail fund to transfer the $46,627 to my industry fund accumulation account.
The retail fund closed my account and transferred my balance on June 19.
The industry fund sent me an email on June 28 asking me to log onto my account to read an “importance notice”. That notice merely confirmed it had credited $46,627 to the accumulation account on June 22.
There was no mention, nor trace, of most of my TTR or its decent balance.
Hence my panic.
With no answer to an email query by the following morning, I rang the super fund and copped a smarmy operator who dismissively told me my only fund was my accumulation account.
It took some persuasion for a helpful person in the pensions team to take my worries seriously and to start chasing answers.
Their story, which I accept for now, is that they received an instruction from SuperStream on June 19 to close my TTR account and to send the money back to my accumulation account.
It is highly unusual for someone to move money from a tax-free TTR account back into a taxed accumulation account.
Hence they put the full balance of my TTR into an escrow account after closing the pension account on June 22, they said.
They needed time to consult their experts to work out what to do.
Bizarrely, their actions did not include contacting me by phone or secure email to urgently discuss their quandary.
Unless I had not logged onto my account, I likely would not have known of the situation until I received a generic snail mail letter this week telling me the TTR account was closed.
They’re now working out if they can re-open this account, get my money back there and send my pension payment on Friday.
Or do I have to jump on a money-go-round — putting the lion’s share of my savings back into accumulation phase and then setting up a new TTR?