What an SMSF costs, and whether it is worth it at your balance.

LINK Advisors publishes $3,025 for establishment - the fund, the deed, the trustee company and the registrations. If the fund is going to borrow to buy property, a bare trust and its trustee company add $2,525, and they have to exist before anyone signs a contract. Cheaper online setups exist and start near zero; what they usually do not include is anyone looking at whether the fund should exist at all.

The unavoidable pieces are accounting and the annual return, the independent audit, the ATO's supervisory levy, and ASIC's review fee if you use a corporate trustee. On top sit investment costs and any advice you take. The total varies mostly with how many investments the fund holds and how well the records are kept - a fund holding one commercial property and a cash account costs less to administer than one trading twenty share lines.

It depends entirely on the balance, because the costs behave differently. A pooled fund charges largely as a percentage, so the dollar cost rises with the balance. An SMSF's core costs are close to fixed, so the percentage falls as the balance rises. There is a crossover point, and where it sits depends on your balance and what your fund actually does. Work out your fund's likely annual cost, divide it by your balance, and compare that percentage with what your current fund charges - that is the honest comparison, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion.

There is no legal minimum. ASIC moved away from recommending a fixed balance benchmark in favour of assessing cost against benefit for the individual, so anyone quoting you a single number is quoting a rule of thumb, not a rule. The reason a figure gets repeated is the arithmetic above: fixed costs are a large share of a small balance and a small share of a large one. The better question is what the SMSF is for - if there is a specific thing it does that your current fund cannot, that reason often carries the cost.

Generally the fund can claim the costs of running itself - accounting, audit, the supervisory levy - against its own income, which is taxed at 15% in accumulation phase. Some setup costs are capital in nature and treated differently. It is a question for the fund's accountant on the specific expense rather than a rule that holds across all of them.

Establishment, accounting, the annual return and wind-up sit with LINK Advisors, whose prices are published. The audit is a separate independent engagement by law. LINK Wealth's role is the advice: whether an SMSF suits you, and what the fund should do once it exists. We say who does what because a single quoted number that bundles all of it usually hides which parts are optional.