Most Australians have had more jobs than super accounts they can name. Every casual job that came with a default fund, every employer who used a different one, every account left behind when you moved states — they don't close themselves. They sit there, quietly charging fees, until somebody goes looking.
The Australian Taxation Office holds a large pool of lost and unclaimed superannuation on behalf of people who never came back for it. Some of it is yours.
The four-minute version
- Sign in to myGov and link the ATO if you haven't already
- Go to Super, then Fund details
- You'll see every fund attached to your tax file number — including ones you'd forgotten
That list is the thing worth writing down. Not the balances, which change. The fund names, because those are what your family will need if they ever have to make a claim.
Why this matters more than the balance
Superannuation is not automatically covered by your will. The fund decides where a death benefit goes, guided by whatever nomination is on file with them.
That means a forgotten fund is not just a forgotten balance. It is a forgotten decision, made by a company that has never met your family, based on a form you may have filled in fifteen years ago at a job you barely remember.
The part almost nobody expects
Most default super accounts include life insurance automatically. You did not sign up for it, you were probably never told about it in a way you registered, and it is on the last annual statement in a section most people never read.
Families routinely never claim it, because nobody knew to ask. A fund will not chase your family down to tell them.
If you find three old accounts, you may have found three insurance policies.
What to write down
For each fund on that list:
- The fund's name — not the account number
- Whether it includes insurance, and roughly how much
- Whether a binding death benefit nomination exists, and the date it was made
That last one has a catch worth knowing: binding nominations commonly lapse after three years unless they were made non-lapsing. A nomination from 2019 may no longer be doing anything at all.
What we won't tell you
Whether to consolidate your accounts, whether to make a nomination, or who to name in it.
Those are financial decisions with real consequences — consolidating can cancel insurance you'd have wanted to keep — and they belong with your fund or a licensed adviser, not with us. What we can do is make sure your family knows the accounts exist.