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Investments into a pension account

Eligibility to invest in a pension

Generally, you can only rollover unrestricted non-preserved amounts into a pension account.

However, if you have reached your preservation age you may elect to commence an account based pension using preserved or restricted non-preserved amounts, known as a transition to retirement pension, however particular restrictions apply to withdrawals until you retire or meet another condition of release. Please refer to Pension payments section for more information about these restrictions.

Your pension application

You must include details of all amounts with which you wish to commence your pension on your pension application form. This includes:

  • amounts you may wish to transfer from an existing account within the Fund
  • any new contributions, and
  • any amounts you wish to rollover from other superannuation funds.

These amounts will form the capital to support your pension.1

Any amounts that are not identified in your application cannot be applied to commence your pension. If you wish to commence a pension based in whole or in part on a new contribution, we will open a new Super Division account to accept the contribution (and deduct contributions tax where applicable). This account will be operated only for the purpose of receiving super contributions, transfers and rollovers used as capital to commence your Pension Division account. Once all amounts have been received and transferred to your Pension Division account, this Super Division account will be closed. You will not be able to access any benefit directly from the new Super Division account.

If you plan to commence a pension based in whole or part on personal contributions that you intend to claim as a tax deduction, you must ensure that you have submitted a deduction notice for these contributions before (or at the time of) applying to commence a pension. After this time, a deduction notice for these contributions will not be accepted or varied under any circumstances.

Establishing your pension

We will establish your Pension Division account as soon as practicable after we have accepted your application.

If your pension will be wholly or partially based on roll over amounts, it is important that you arrange for the payment of them to us as soon as possible as they will be included in the capital applied to support your pension.1

Pension payments will generally not commence until all contributions and rollovers identified on your application form have been received by us. However, if we have not received all of those amounts in sufficient time for us to make the first financial year's required payment (generally on or before 15th June in the financial year), we will calculate your pension based on the amounts we have received up to that time and commence making your pension payments.2 The capital supporting your pension will then only include the amounts received by us and no further contributions or rollover amounts can be added to it.

Under the Trust Deed, we have the power (as trustee) to commute your pension and apply the commuted amount to a new pension for you from the Fund. We would only do so if we considered it necessary for administrative, regulatory or tax purposes and, in any event, we would notify you before we did so.

Pension Update functionality

You are able to commute an existing pension and combine the proceeds with additional superannuation monies to commence a new pension within your existing Pension Division account. Your account number, personal details and transaction history will be retained.

This can be requested using the Pension Update Request Form, available from your adviser.

1 If you wish to commence a pension based in whole or part on a rollover that includes an untaxed element, tax will be deducted on this element upon receipt of it by us at the rate of 15 per cent so that the amount included in the capital to support your pension will be net of tax.

2 If we receive your first application amount in June of a financial year, you are not required to receive a pension payment in that financial year.