CareSuper Review: Fees, Performance and the Ten Dollar Switch

💰 What you pay at each balance🔗

That shape is not a quirk of the pricing. Part of the charge is a flat dollar amount, and a flat dollar amount takes a bigger bite out of a small balance than a large one. As your balance grows the same charge gets spread across more money, so the percentage shrinks while the charge itself does not. You are not being rewarded for loyalty, you are diluting a fixed cost.

One piece behaves differently from the rest. The 0.30% administration slice, about $150 a year at a $50,000 balance, is charged whatever markets do. Rising year, flat year, ugly year, it comes out. That is the piece a fund controls directly and the piece to compare if you are putting two funds side by side on cost alone.

📊 The test, and the median🔗

The default returned 6.36% a year over five years, against a median of 5.90% for products in its 60%-75% growth band. So it sat 0.46 points above the middle of its own group. Three-year returns were 8.28% and ten-year 7.73%.

The performance test is a different animal. APRA builds a benchmark for each product out of that product's own asset mix, then asks whether the product beat it. Clear the floor and the product stays open. Miss it for long enough and there are consequences, up to closing to new members.

🪙 The switch worth ten dollars🔗

Across the other reviews on this site, the recurring useful move is to look for a cheaper option inside your own fund that sits at a similar risk level. At Hostplus that gap is wide enough to matter. Here it is Alternative Growth at 0.92% against the default's 0.94%.

That is a gap of 0.02 percentage points, which on a $50,000 balance works out at roughly $10 a year. Meanwhile you would be holding a slightly different mix, 69.5% in growth assets against the default's 71.9%.

Over five years Alternative Growth returned 6.46% against the default's 6.36%. Do not read that as a win. A gap of 0.10 points over five years is noise: shift the start date by a few months and it closes or reverses, which is exactly what you would expect from two portfolios this similar.

🌱 Same price, same risk, different path🔗

Sustainable Balanced is the more interesting row on this menu. It carries exactly the same 0.94% fee and exactly the same 71.9% growth allocation as the default, which makes it the only genuinely like-for-like pair in this whole series of reviews. Over five years it returned 6.55% against the default's 6.36%, a gap of 0.19 percentage points.

Bigger than the fee gap above, still small enough to be noise. Screens and exclusions help in some markets and hurt in others, and five years is not long enough to declare a winner when the gap can appear or disappear depending on the month you start counting.

What the pair does tell you is useful: a sustainable tilt costs nothing extra here. If you would rather your money avoided certain sectors, that preference is free at this fund. If you are chasing the 0.19 points, you are chasing the weather.

🛡️ Where the menu really gets cheaper🔗

Everything genuinely cheaper on this menu is also far more defensive. The 3 options below the default's 0.94% that sit well under its risk level hold 50.9%, 34.4%, 0.0% in growth assets, against 71.9%. A cash-heavy or bond-heavy option is cheaper to run than a spread of global shares and unlisted assets, so the fee drops.

Moving to one of them is not trimming a cost. It is changing what you own: a different portfolio with a different job, a different expected return and a much smaller chance of a bad year. Do it because the risk level suits your timeline, not because the fee column looks tidier. A cheaper option that sits below inflation after fees for a thirty-year-old is an expensive option in every way that counts.

🔍 Where to spend the attention instead🔗

You will not get a verdict here, because a verdict on a fund without knowing your balance, age, insurance and other accounts is not worth the pixels. What you can do is look at the things that are genuinely lopsided.

Start with the member figure: 570,070 member accounts, not members. Anyone holding two, say one from an old job they never merged, is counted twice. So the number describes paperwork as much as people, and it points at the most common leak in the system. A second account means a second set of fees and often a second set of insurance premiums. Consolidating super covers the order of operations, insurance first.

Then insurance itself. Check what cover sits inside your super, what it costs and whether the definitions match how you actually earn. Cover you cannot claim on is a cost with no upside. Then your balance, and whether you are in the default because you chose it or because you never got around to choosing.

That is the real finding of this review. The switching lever inside this fund has little to give, so spend the attention on balance, insurance and duplicate accounts instead. Those three have room in them.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗