Most Australians have at least one of these. The good news: each is fixable in an afternoon.
Your super is probably your second-biggest asset after your home. For some Australians it's the biggest. And yet for most people, it sits quietly in the background, untouched and unreviewed for years at a time.
That neglect has a cost. Not a one-off cost — a slow, compounding cost that, by retirement, can easily run to six figures. Here are the five most common mistakes I see when new clients come in and ask me to take a look at their super.
Every job change creates the temptation of a new default super account. By age 40, plenty of Australians are paying admin fees on three or four accounts they barely remember opening. ATO data still shows hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in lost or unclaimed super.
Two sets of $100/year admin fees becomes $200/year. Add overlapping insurance premiums you didn't know you had, and you're easily losing $500–$1,000 a year before your money even has a chance to grow. Compound that over 25 years and the loss is real.
The fix: log into myGov → ATO → Super, see every account in your name, and consolidate to one. The catch: consolidating can cancel insurance you've been paying for. Always check what's attached and either preserve it or replace it with equivalent cover before you click the rollover button.
Most super funds put new members into a "balanced" or default option. That's fine for some people, wrong for others. A 30-year-old in a conservative option is leaving a lot of long-term return on the table. A 65-year-old in high-growth is taking risk they can't afford to recover from.
The gap between a "balanced" return and a "growth" return averages around 1.5% per year. On a $200,000 balance over 25 years, that's the difference between roughly $580k and $850k at retirement. Same money, same fund, different button.
The fix: match your investment option to your time horizon and your tolerance for short-term ups and downs. The right answer is personal — it depends on when you'll need the money and how you'd react if your balance dropped 20% in a bad year.
The concessional (pre-tax) contribution cap for FY26 is $30,000. Most employees only have around $11,000–$15,000 of that used by their compulsory employer Super Guarantee. The rest is "headroom" you can fill with salary sacrifice or personal deductible contributions — taxed at 15% in super instead of your marginal rate of 32% or 39%.
For someone earning $120k, salary-sacrificing an extra $10k a year saves around $1,700 in tax annually and grows in a low-tax environment. Over a working life, that's a six-figure difference at retirement.
The fix: work out your total concessional contributions for the year (employer + any salary sacrifice). If you're under the $30k cap and have spare cashflow, redirect some to super. Bonus: if you've under-used the cap in recent years, you may be able to use unused amounts via the carry-forward rule.
Most super funds bundle Life, TPD and sometimes Income Protection into your account by default. It's better than no cover, but it's almost never tailored to your actual situation. People with young families and a mortgage are routinely under-covered. Single people without dependants are routinely paying for cover they don't need.
The fix: check your current cover (it'll be in your annual statement or member portal). Compare it to what you'd actually need if something happened. The gap — either way — is worth fixing properly.
Your super doesn't automatically go to your estate when you die. The trustee of your super fund decides who gets it — guided by a "non-binding" nomination if you have one, or by their own assessment of your dependants if you don't. That can mean delays, disputes, and sometimes a different outcome than you'd have wanted.
The fix: set up a binding death benefit nomination, naming exactly who you want the money to go to. It takes about 10 minutes via your fund's member portal and removes any ambiguity. Most binding nominations need to be re-signed every three years, so set a calendar reminder.
If any of these sounds like you and you'd like a second pair of eyes on your super, the discovery chat is complimentary. We'll run through your statements together and tell you whether any of these mistakes are quietly happening in your account.