How It Works

No magic. Just the maths — both tools explained.

The budget planner uses bucket budgeting to split your weekly take-home into jobs. The super calculator turns published fee data into real, comparable annual costs. Here’s exactly how both work.

Tool 1 · Budget Planner

Bucket budgeting in four steps

Give every dollar a job — bills, investing, spending and savings — so your surplus doesn’t just disappear.

1

Enter your income

Type your take-home pay at whatever frequency it arrives — weekly, fortnightly, monthly. The planner converts everything to a weekly figure so you can think in one unit.

2

List your fixed costs

Add each bill at the frequency it actually arrives (yearly rego, monthly phone plan). The planner weeklyises every one and totals them into your Recurring Expenses bucket automatically.

3

Set your buckets

Divide the remainder between buckets — DCA investing, a splurge fund, a SMILE (savings) account. Drag the sliders until every percentage is assigned. Hit auto-balance to split proportionally.

4

Your budget flows to super

Whatever lands in your DCA / invest bucket becomes your annual super contribution in the fee calculator — automatically. You enter the number once and it carries across.

Tool 2 · Super Fee Calculator

How we calculate each fund’s real annual fee

We don’t guess and we don’t round. Every fund’s total fee is built from three components.

1

You give us two things

Your current super balance and the fund you’re with today. That’s it — no login, no email, no personal details. Everything runs in your browser.

2

We calculate each fund’s real annual fee

For every fund we add the administration fee (a fixed dollar amount plus a percentage of your balance, respecting each fund’s dollar cap and balance cap) to the investment fee (the cost of the underlying shares, weighted to your Australian / International mix).

3

We show the saving — this year and over time

We rank every fund, highlight the cheapest, and show your yearly saving. Then we project both funds forward to retirement — growing the balance and deducting each year’s fee — so you see the compounding cost, not just one year’s difference.

The method

Total annual fee

admin fee + investment fee
admin = fixed $ + min( % × min(balance, balance cap), dollar cap )
investment = ( mix × Aus cost + (1−mix) × Int'l cost ) × balance
Fixed fee — a flat weekly/annual dollar charge some funds apply regardless of balance.
Percentage admin fee — a slice of your balance, which is why big balances feel high fees most.
Caps — many funds cap the percentage in dollars, or stop charging it above a balance threshold. We honour both.
Investment fee — the cost of the actual shares/index option, blended to your chosen Aus/Int'l mix.

Worked example · $1,000,000 balance, 50/50 mix

Aware Super
Fixed$52
Admin % (capped)$750
Investment (0.09%)$900
Annual fee$1,702
Vanguard (theoretical)
Fixed$0
Admin % (capped)$600
Investment (0.14%)$1,400
Annual fee$2,000

These figures reproduce the source comparison exactly. Fees are estimates on balanced/index options and can change — always confirm against a fund's PDS.

Why compounding

A fee isn't a one-off — it's a leak

Every dollar paid in fees is also a dollar that can't grow. Over decades, a small percentage gap becomes a large dollar gap.

Time

It runs for decades

A fee at 35 also costs you the growth it would've earned for the next 30 years.

Hidden

You never see a bill

Fees come straight out of your balance, so they're easy to ignore — until you model them.

Control

It's the bit you can fix

You can't control markets, but you can control which fund holds your money.

Ready when you are

Get started with both tools

Budget first, then tackle your super. Your numbers carry across automatically.

Open the toolkit