The best way to spend $20 a week.

It will make a massive difference – trust us.

OK, so maybe the word ‘best’ isn’t quite the right thing to say when talking about superannuation. Perhaps I should have said ‘smartest’ $20 a week spend – because that’s really what it is.

Stay with me on this one, I’ll tell you why.

As women, and working women at that, we should all be taking the right steps now to ensure our future is as secure as it can be. Investing in your own super is one of the best ways to go about it.

Think of it this way – $20 a week over ten years is an extra $10,400 towards your lifestyle as a retiree and that doesn’t even include any possible investment earnings – something that I know can be hard to imagine now as we proceed through the daily grind of working life.

But from your pay, $20 is something that you’d barely notice at the moment – but down the track it will mean a nice dinner out with friends or presents for the grandkids. It is an amount that could make a real difference to your lifestyle in the future.

I know it’s hard to picture now, but I’m told there is a magical time ahead. It’s a time where you exit the workplace and commit ‘meetings’ and ‘deadlines’ to a thing of the past. A time where you no longer need to wear a uniform daily and I’m told that it’s a time where you can sleep in each and every day if you so wish.

Sounds blissful, right? So it pays to give a small amount of consideration into what you can do now which can make this time more enjoyable.

I know that superannuation is one of those things that always gets pushed to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list as there’s always more pressing things… work, social commitments, children, family; all of these things make it easy to shove super into the back of your mind to ‘get to later’.

Super is something that is often set up when we are younger and first entering the workforce. Unless you are a highly organised teen, setting up the account is often done by your employer. From there it plods along and we just fill in the membership number on each new employment form when prompted.

If you’re like me, it’s also possible that you’ve gained yourself several super accounts while changing jobs (it literally takes one form to amalgamate them all – so do it. No excuses).

It also pays to find the right super fund for you. Industry super funds return profits to members rather than shareholders and are designed specifically for people who work in particular sectors. They also tend to outperform other types of funds – so they are definitely worth looking into.

The point I’m trying to make is that super is not something we should be so disengaged with. Rather, it’s something we should familiarise ourselves with and recognise as an important investment in our future.

It only takes one simple step though to organise yourself. The biggest difference you could make to your super is to put a bit more money in. You just need to set up an automatic payment. Depending on what you earn, you can either set up an automatic debit on the day that your pay hits your bank account and forget about it (plus the government may even chip in up to $500 if you are a low income earner), or ask your employer to take a bit more out of your pay and put it into your super.

Before long you won’t even notice that $20 and you can just sit back and let it accumulate into something very worthwhile down the track.

Just do it.

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