Super Strange at Hostplus

Scott

I’m a 27-year-old with my super in Hostplus. I got an email from them talking about ‘unlisted assets’ which to be honest made no sense at all. Can you please break down what this means for me as someone with my super in the Indexed Balanced Fund.

Grace

Hi Grace,

My guess is that they’re talking about their Balanced Fund, which has a lot of unlisted investments (i.e. they aren’t traded on a stock market).

None of this applies to you.

Since you’re in the Indexed Balanced Fund (like me!), you have zero exposure to unlisted assets.

Now, I know the funds sound the same, but they are very, very different beasts.

Let’s compare the pair:

The Balanced Fund has high fees … in excess of 1%.

The Indexed Balanced Fund has very low fees … it’s the cheapest pure play index fund in the country, with fees at 0.05%.

(That’s more than 20 times cheaper.)

The Balanced Fund has 37% of its investments in illiquid investments that are hard to price, and hard to sell in a pinch.

The Indexed Balanced Fund is a very transparent portfolio, made up entirely of index funds, which are priced every business day. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, but you don’t need to worry about unlisted investments. And that’s because you don’t own any.

Scott

Reminder: I first wrote about this years ago and highlighted the low fees. Today there are cheaper index super funds on offer. How do I know? Because my readers constantly email me about them! So before you do anything, go to YourSuper.gov.au and compare super funds first.