Give yourself a head start in life by avoiding these common financial mistakes and developing good habits.
The life you dream of is within reach when you invest for your long term goals. Our professionally managed portfolios make it easy to get started investing and stay invested.
Is financial independence your north star? Or do you just want to grow your savings? Whatever it is, your money can work harder for you when you invest. We’re here to help.
Compound growth is your most powerful investment tool. As your returns are reinvested over time, they generate additional earnings. Even a modest start can lead to substantial gains if you stay invested.
Calculate how much you need to invest and contribute to meet your wealth goals.
Ranging from conservative to high growth. We have a portfolio to suit your goals. We also offer 5 single asset portfolios to focus on specific investment markets.
Simply tell us about yourself, your goals, savings, any other investments, and how long you think you’ll invest. We’ll recommend a suitable InvestSMART portfolio for you.
Give yourself a head start in life by avoiding these common financial mistakes and developing good habits.
The core investment philosophy at InvestSMART focuses on the principles of diversification, low fees and investing for the long term. Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), in comparison to unlisted managed funds, provide a cost-effective method to ascertain these goals. They also have liquidity benefits, being easier to buy and sell at short notice.
ETFs provide broad diversification by only needing to purchase a small number of securities. In contrast, when buying and holding hundreds of individual securities to achieve a similar level of diversification, greater costs are incurred in brokerage and fees – imagine the brokerage to buy 200 individual stocks!
ETFs are also great for managing risk. When you invest in an ETF, you lessen individual company risk and sector risk. By holding a basket of individual stocks, you are not limiting your exposure to individual sectors of the market.
In using ETFs, InvestSMART has the capacity to pass on these lower costs to the investor in the form of capped fees and low-cost investing. As fees compound over time, even a slight increase in fees can result in substantial differences to your return.
You can read more on ETFs here.
We can't tell you what portfolio to choose as we can provide general financial product advice only about the products that InvestSMART offers.
We cannot provide any personal financial advice and you should consider your own financial objectives, financial situation and needs before making an investment decision and submitting an application.
We have a number of tools you can use at InvestSMART including the Portfolio Manager and online calculators.
You will notice a common thread throughout the guides, the investment time-frame. We recommend investors look at the suggested time-frame associated with each portfolio to see if it aligns with their investment goal.
Here is a list of tools and guides to help select the right portfolio:
Additionally, we have InvestSMART Bootcamp which is a comprehenisve investment course designed to get you started on the right foot. Click here for further details.
InvestSMART is the first to cap management fees in Australia. Costs are inevitable, but at the end of the day fees compound just like returns. From Alan Kohler's Great Investment Fee Scam:
"When it comes to investment management the more you pay, the less you get, for the simple but obvious reason that the price you pay comes off what you get.
Think about it. The “product” you buy is an investment return, and the amount you pay for assistance in achieving it reduces the return. The higher the price, the more it reduces the “product”.
There is no other thing on earth where that applies – where the price you pay for it eats into the product itself. Imagine if the more you paid for glasses, the less you could see!"
Research shows 75% of managed funds do not beat the industry standard benchmarks over ten years. The average underperformance percentage is 1.37%. The average fee charged by these funds is 1.39%. We do not believe this is just a coincidence.
Over the course of 30 years a 1% fee would see a reduction in your total investment return of 26%. This means you have built 26% less of a nest egg than you could have, as mentioned, fees are inevitable but you should try to minimise them as much as you can.
By capping the management fee, InvestSMART takes a negative of the industry and turns it into a positive. The difference? The gap between the InvestSMART portfolio performance compared to the peer group. More money in your portfolio means more income and more growth and a wider gap to the competitors.
This is the most common question we get from experienced and inexperienced investors alike.
No matter when you are looking to invest, there will always be something in the news that will have you asking this question. Whether it is a commentary on our local housing market, geopolitical uncertainty, or fears of a global pandemic. Uncertainty is constant, yet history shows us investment markets and asset classes continue to grow over the long term.
Having an investment plan and sticking to it is far more important than picking the exact day or week to invest. Developing good investment habits by investing for the long-term, in the right mix of asset classes, adding to your investment over time and rebalancing in a systematic fashion will see you reach your goal. In addition, chopping and changing your portfolio will chew up returns with transactions costs and potentially reduce your invested capital by paying additional taxes.
InvestSMART can help you select and stick to a plan:
Provides simple contribution and income reinvestment options
Transparent online monitoring through your 'My Account'
Consolidated annual tax reporting direct to your inbox
InvestSMART is a digital wealth platform and despite being digital its success lies in its human touch. Your relationship with money is deeply personal, from how we earn it to how we spend, save and invest it. And so, with the individual in mind, we designed our service.
We are a digital wealth platform that uses the "digital" aspect to enhance our human support. There is always a knowledgeable real person to help you when you need, through our content, help centre, webinars, on-site chat, dedicated client only inbox and old-fashioned phone calls. It's not by accident our support is mentioned more than anything else in our reviews.
It is unusual for a financial service provider to make a song and dance about its fees. But when you are the first provider to introduce a capped fee, instead of being a negative, it becomes a positive. 0.55%pa is a low management fee compared to the average and we take that a step further and cap it at $550pa. What this boils down to is more of your money generating growth and income for you.
You'll notice the InvestSMART portfolios are all compared to peers. This means the average return of all other funds that are aligned to the same industry standard benchmark as our portfolios. Why? Because these are viable alternatives that you could invest in. We aim to outperform the average of our peers by the differential in our fees. You'll notice the gap to peers at the start is small, but if you compound that difference year after year, you will notice that gap grows significantly. We keep our costs low, keeping more in your account compounding for you.
Our Investment Committee is 100% independent of product issuers and have built careers in markets over decades and they distill that experience into our service. Their independence sees our portfolios hold the best ETFs to meet our clients' needs, regardless of who issues the ETF.
You are the legal owner of your investments with InvestSMART. All accounts have their own HIN in the client's name. Additionally, two-factor authentication is used for any portfolio changes.
We understand it will happen, but it’s unpleasant when it does. So, here’s what to do when your account balance goes the wrong way.
The securities markets are often associated with big swings in prices. For example, when the stock market rises and falls more than one per cent over a sustained period, it is called a “volatile” market. See Nuts and Bolts: What is Volatility.
Reasons behind volatility will vary, and seeing headlines detailing consecutive down days in markets and then seeing the flow-on effect on your investment portfolio tends to induce concern.
We invest knowing down days will occur, and it’s how we react to them that will determine your long-term investment success. Here’s how you and InvestSMART help to manage volatile times and keep your investments on track:
I’d recommend this excellent piece by my colleague John Addis on How to Worry Better for further reading.
Finally, we’re here to help. Use the chat function, email or call on 1300 880 160. We cannot provide personal/specific advice, but we can talk about investing generally and account management.
InvestSMART aims to make building and maintaining your wealth easy. The best investing is done slowly, almost forgotten about in the background and a great way to ensure you continue to grow your wealth is to use the InvestSMART automated account settings.
Anyone over the age of 18 and is an Australian resident can open an InvestSMART account. For minors, an adult must invest as trustee for the child.
Types of accounts with InvestSMART:
Can you invest your super with InvestSMART?
When clients ask if their investment is safe with InvestSMART there are two main categories they are referring to; investment risk and the security of their investment.
When you invest in anything other than a term deposit, you are taking risk. Investing is not about avoiding risk; it is about balancing risk with return and having an understanding of the risks associated with each asset class.
The InvestSMART team build investment portfolios designed around different risk profiles from conservative through to high growth. These portfolios hold the same asset classes and ETFs, but the weighting allocated to each asset class varies depending on the risk profile. The portfolios are designed to wear the bumps of the market.
Additionally, we recommend this article on how ETFs can help you manage risk.
We take the security of our investors accounts seriously and have built our service around this:
Investors can give their investments the best possible chance by selecting a portfolio in line with the same timeframe as their goal and risk appetite. Additionally, the best defense against volatility is time. Sit tight and allow your portfolio to recover. All investing comes with volatility and occasional uncertainty but, as the famous investor Charlie Munger says, never interrupt your compounding unnecessarily.
Your InvestSMART account will earn dividends through the exchange traded funds (ETFs) it holds. InvestSMART uses a broad range of ETFs across multiple asset classes:
All of these investments earn income and that is paid to you as a distribution. All associated franking credits are passed through to you as well.