SMSF accountant & SMSF accounting services.

An SMSF usually becomes cost-effective once it holds around $200,000 or more, because its running costs are largely fixed rather than a percentage of your balance. It’s a private fund of up to six members who act as trustees and control the investments themselves, which can include the direct property, shares and crypto that industry and retail funds don’t offer.

Example: what it costs to run an SMSF at $250,000

Dev has $250,000 in an industry fund charging about 0.85% a year, roughly $2,125 in fees, invested in a set balanced option he can’t alter. A simple SMSF with fixed-fee administration, an independent audit and the ATO supervisory levy would cost him around $2,500 a year whatever the balance. At $250,000 the two are close, but the SMSF cost stays flat as his balance grows while the percentage fee keeps climbing, and it lets him hold the direct property his industry fund won’t. The tradeoff is that Dev and his fellow trustees now carry the compliance themselves.

Living in a property your SMSF owns

You generally can’t live in a residential property your SMSF owns, because the sole purpose test under the SIS Act requires the fund to be maintained to provide retirement benefits, not to give you or your family the use of an asset today. What you can do with the property depends on whether it’s residential or business real property.

Example: transferring an SMSF property out to live in it

Aisha’s fund owns a unit she’d like to live in one day. While she’s working, the fund can only let it to an arm’s length tenant, so she can’t move in or rent it to family. To live in it she has to reach preservation age, retire and meet a condition of release, then transfer the unit out of the fund into her own name. That transfer is a capital gains event for the fund: on a $300,000 gain, the one-third super discount brings the taxable gain to $200,000, taxed at 15% for about $30,000. Timing is the lever. If the fund has started an account-based pension the unit supports at the point of transfer, that gain can fall to nil as exempt current pension income.

Example: leasing business premises back to your own company

Marco’s fund buys the $600,000 warehouse his company operates from and leases it back to the company at a market rent of $42,000 a year under a written lease. Because it’s business real property, the in-house asset rules that would block leasing a home to family don’t apply. The rent flows into super at the fund’s 15% rate, the fund holds an appreciating asset, and the business has its premises now rather than in retirement.

Who can audit your SMSF

Every SMSF has to be audited each year by an approved SMSF auditor registered with ASIC, and that auditor must be independent, so they can’t be a trustee, a member, or the accountant who prepared the fund’s financials. The audit has to be completed before the fund lodges its annual return with the ATO, which is why DKM coordinates a separate fixed-fee auditor rather than signing off its own work. Our SMSF auditor page covers the process and independence rules in full.

Example: a missed minimum pension caught at audit

A fund pays a member an account-based pension, and one year the minimum drawdown goes out a few weeks into the new financial year instead of by 30 June. At audit the approved auditor tests the fund against the rules that get breached in practice: the investment restrictions, the contribution caps ($30,000 concessional and $120,000 non-concessional for 2025-26), assets held at market value, and the minimum pension. The late payment means the pension can be treated as having stopped for the year, costing the fund its tax exemption on that pension’s earnings, and where the reporting tests are met the auditor lodges an Auditor Contravention Report with the ATO. Getting clean financials across early is what leaves room to catch and fix something like this before lodgement.