FinSmart

Team Name

Team DANS

Team Members

Project Description

To support the livelihoods of Australians impacted due to COVID, the government of Australia has announced that eligible candidates can have early access to their Super contributions. Super is an investment fund collected from the employers of over 5 million Australian employees to ensure that they can retire with enough funds in their possession to live happy retirement life.

The policy and the investment portfolios related to Super funds are one of the best in the world. Over the last couple of decades, super funds have added wealth to Australians at an average of 7% per annum adjusted to inflation. With the announcement of early access to super funds, billions of dollars have been drawn out of the super funds.

(Impact dashboard) With our solution, we have tried to emphasise on the long term impacts of withdrawing super funds given the current circumstances of the employees. The idea is to provide withdrawers with different perspectives on what the long term impact of this withdrawal could look like so that they can make the best decision to compare their short term needs vs long term losses.

(When I start editing values in the form) For example, Sam is 25 years old, she has 10000 dollars in her super funds which she has accumulated over her 2 years of work. She has a current salary of around 60000 dollars and she would be retiring at the age of 66. If she wishes to withdraw 5000$ from her super funds currently. She would be losing over 80000 dollars. This is close to 6% of the total amount she could have had at the time of her retirement in her Super funds had she not withdrawn the amount early. Sam would have to work at least one year extra with her current pay to account for this amount.

Another scenario is where John is 30 years old, he has 20000 dollars in his super account, he wishes to retire at the age of 65, he also makes about 60000 dollars per year and he wishes to withdraw all the amount to buy a brand new car he has always wanted to. He would be losing a whopping amount of over 200000 dollars when he retires. The car he dearly wishes would be worth nothing by that time.

(graph screen)We have also provided year on year impact until someone’s retirement to show how the gap widens with the small withdrawal amount someone wishes to make currently. This also gives an idea around the additional investments someone would have to make to still achieve the same level of super fund portfolio by the time they retire. Users can make the best decisions by considering all these long term impacts. Thank you.

Data Story

The Tax Office dataset provides detailing about the income and age of an Australian tax payer - This forms the basis for our Dashboard, such that we consider all aspects that could affect the Superannuation account at the retirement age. Which in turn helps us in providing the user, with detailing on Long term Financial impacts due to early access - as well as measures that can be taken to minimise this impact if super has been accessed early.