Superannuation tips and tricks to get free money

This is part two of a two-part series on how to supercharge your super. Read part one: The acid test to find out if your super fund is a winner or a dud.

High interest rates and soaring cost of living mean our work-life balance is off-kilter, with less scope for life and a whole lot more work.

While we are all consumed with the immediate need to cope, you can’t work like this forever. So, it’s vital to work the superannuation system so you can stop work earlier.

Also by Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon:

• $456 a month: The loan that will slash your mortgage repayment

• Savings apps and hacks: How to slash costs with cash back

• 5.5% savings rate: Where to find the highest interest in 11 years

There are new low- or no-cost opportunities to dramatically boost your super. Here are two tips you need to know and two tricks you need to do.

My two top super tips

There are two things you need to know to get what is rightfully yours in the first place, in terms of your super entitlement.

Tip one: Every employer, if you are over 18 - or under 18 but work more than 30 hours a week - now must pay you super. There used to be a ridiculous rule that required you to earn $450 a month from each job before you would qualify.

This particularly disadvantaged women, who were phasing back into the workplace after having children, with potentially a few different casual jobs.

Tip two: The amount of super your employer needs to pay has just gone up to 11 per cent (on its way to 12 per cent in two years), based on your ‘normal’ hours of work.

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) said: “If you can't determine their [an employee’s] normal hours of work (such as for casual workers), the actual hours the employee works are their ordinary hours of work.”

So, your first step in a more clever, more beneficial super strategy is to get every dollar of super that you deserve. Note that this has to be paid into your account by your employer at least quarterly.

And now that you know my top two super tips, that brings me to…

My two top super tricks

Once you have ensured you are getting what is yours, you can set about getting extra. There are two main ways of doing this. And you should be taking advantage of these huge super-boosting opportunities year after year.

Trick one: If you earn less than $58,445 per year (salaried or self-employed) and you contribute $1,000 after tax into super, the government will top it up by up to $500. To calculate whether you’re eligible, the ATO says your “total income” for the financial year is your:

• Assessable income

• Reportable fringe benefits total (RFBT), plus

• Total reportable employer super contributions reduced (but not below zero) by any excess concessional (before-tax) contributions

If you qualify, the 50 per cent instant return is nothing you will get in investment EVER. And it is a great strategy to rescue your super if you have cut back paid work to work even harder to raise children.

Trick two: This is a brilliant whole-of-family solution to save the super of an at-home carer, whose rewards might be personal but by no means financial. One working spouse can pay $3,000 after tax into their spouse’s (working or not) super account, and are ‘richly’ rewarded for doing so.

Provided the payee partner is on less than $40,000 annually, the payer gets a tax offset of up to $540, which can then be taken off the payer’s tax bill. It’s like an instant tax discount.

It doesn’t have to cost much – or it could cost just a little – to make your super work harder while you’re busy working.

Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon is the author of How to Get Mortgage-Free Like Me, available at www.nicolessmartmoney.com. Follow Nicole on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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