As a young person/mid lifer accumulating super and whose retirement is some way away... What are the positives of this market fall and how can I ensure I am positioned to benefit from the growth post COVID 19?
Kate in Fremantle
Top answer provided by:
Nicole Niu
Hi Kate,
From your question I am going to assume that you have decent knowledge around the market and economic cycle and you worry more about your super not growing fast enough than losing money in the short term, in general.
If you are employed and not on JobKeeper payment, the best course of action is to just stay put. This is because your employer would still be making superannuation payment into your fund, and when the cash hits your super fund, the fund will be buying investment assets at fire-sale prices due to people panic selling them. Your age is a bonus as you would have more years to ride out the market corrections and for the investment to compound (look up “compound interest” on MoneySmart.gov.au).
If you have the capacity, you could consider making additional super contributions, as young as possible, to capture the low prices while you can and to compound even more - please speak to a financial adviser and make sure you do it right. People make the wrong type of contribution a lot more often than you think and can end up being worse off financially than before.
For someone like yourself, I would also encourage you to pause a minute and think about the nature of money if you haven’t yet done so.
Our currency, the Aussie dollar, is a commodity, acting in the same way other commodities do. If you mass-produce it, the value of it will be diluted. Money can be produced by a central bank, in our case the Reserve Bank of Australia. In the current climate, the Reserve Bank has already had to (digitally) print Aussie dollars, and lend them to the Federal and State government for them to use towards the economy.
What this means to you is that the cash you are holding now in your bank account would worth a little less next year, and the trend would continue for many years. We don’t have many choices other than riding with it and finding ways to grow your money more than it loses its value. It might sound simple but it’s not, especially now as we don’t know what the current situation would do to our pre-COVID-19, low inflation, low interest rate and low wage growth economy. My guess is that beating inflation would become increasingly difficult as we wake up from over a decade's almost uninterrupted growth, and you certainly can’t hold on to the traditional “safe” investment assets for too much longer.
Hope this helps and I am available for a chat if anyone is interested.
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