I Had No Idea What Superannuation Was
I immigrated to Australia from Ukraine in August 1999 under the skilled migration programme. I was 29. Back in Ukraine - and still to this day - there is no personal superannuation. Your employer pays into a giant government pension fund, the government decides how much you get when you retire, and that's it. You have no say.
After finishing English for Adults at TAFE, I started my first Australian job at Telstra in February 2000, working in the dedicated hosting team out of the Broadway exchange in Sydney. My employer opened a super account for me and I ticked whatever default options were on the form. I had no framework for understanding what any of it meant.
I left Telstra in September 2001 - I remember the timing vividly because I gave my notice around 9/11 - and joined Veritas, an American company with an Australian branch. I rolled my super over to an ING fund. I still wasn't paying much attention.
Then the 2008 financial crisis hit.
The GFC Wake-Up Call
I watched funds get locked. Real estate options inside managed super funds became impossible to exit. Balances dropped and there was nothing you could do about it. It was an unpleasant education in what happens when someone else controls your money.
That year, my wife and I set up a Self-Managed Super Fund (SMSF) through eSuperfund. But we were shaken. From 2008 to 2015 - seven years - we kept everything in high-interest term deposits. Safe, yes. But looking back, we missed out on one of the longest bull markets in history.
Slowly Taking the Wheel
In 2015 I finally invested our SMSF money into UBS managed funds - or so I thought. A year later I discovered I'd accidentally put part of it into an Australian bond fund instead of Australian shares. I corrected it in 2016, but it was a reminder of how easy it is to make mistakes when you're navigating this alone.
Meanwhile, I was watching the fintech space. I'd been involved in startups - I co-founded Freedcamp, a project management platform - and was fascinated by companies like Wealthfront in the US, where algorithms selected, invested, and rebalanced your portfolio automatically. I even contacted the Wealthfront team asking if they'd expand to Australia or let me help them build that business here. No luck.
Then I found Stockspot - though only in 2020. They'd been helping SMSF clients manage their retirement investments since 2017, and to this day I'm not sure why it took me so long to come across them.
Stockspot: Close, But Not Quite
Stockspot was exactly what I'd been waiting for - an Australian robo-advisor with transparent ETF portfolios. I sold our UBS fund units and moved everything over in 2020.
For a while, I was happy. Stockspot's portfolios are publicly available, their ETF selection is solid, and they handle rebalancing automatically. But over time, the friction points became clear:
The fees add up.
Stockspot charges a percentage of your portfolio - 0.528% per year for balances over $200,000. On our SMSF that worked out to roughly $1,400 a year - and because it's a percentage, the bill climbs every year your balance grows. At today's balance it would be over $3,100 a year - and all it was really doing was rebalancing about six times a year (trimming whichever ETF had run ahead, topping up the rest), which I now do myself in a couple of clicks.
Small contributions sit idle.
For accounts over $200,000, Stockspot won't invest until new deposits reach $2,000. My wife's fortnightly super contributions of ~$500 would just sit in cash, waiting for my larger contribution to arrive - frequently missing market dips along the way.
No control over timing.
I couldn't choose when Stockspot would invest. If markets were up 3%, my money went in anyway. If a particular ETF had a bad day - exactly when I'd want to buy - I had no way to act on it.
Going Solo
In 2023 I moved our SMSF to Stake Super. The numbers made the decision easy:
| Stockspot | Stake Super | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual management fee | 0.528%+ of portfolio | $0 |
| SMSF administration | eSuperfund — $1,499/year | $990/year |
| Brokerage | Included (but no control) | $3 per trade |
| Investment timing | Stockspot decides | I decide |
| Minimum to invest | $2,000 per deposit | Any amount |
I didn't even need to sell our ETF holdings - I transferred them directly from Stockspot to Stake. Same five ETFs - Stockspot's Emerald (Growth) portfolio - just without the percentage fee and with full control over when and how I invest.
All in, the move cut what we pay to run the fund from around $3,000 a year - Stockspot's management fee plus eSuperfund administration - to about $1,100: Stake Super's flat $990 plus a few dollars of brokerage. And because the old fee was a percentage of the balance, that gap only widens as the fund grows.
Now when my wife's $500 contribution lands, I can put it straight into whichever ETF needs topping up. If markets are running hot, I can wait. If an ETF I hold drops, I can buy the dip. Three years in, I haven't looked back.
The Questions That Wouldn't Go Away
Self-managing solved the fee problem, but it surfaced a whole new set of questions:
- Does investment timing matter? If I buy on the 5th of the month versus the 20th, does it make any difference over 10 years?
- Should I invest immediately or wait? When my contribution arrives, should I invest that day? Split it across the fortnight? Wait for a dip?
- How should I handle a lump sum? If I roll over $400,000 from another fund, should I invest it all at once or drip-feed it over months? What if I set a rule to only buy after a 5% dip?
- Do the "professional" portfolios actually win? Stockspot's portfolios are built by financial professionals - are they measurably better than a simple DIY allocation?
- What about dividends? If I reinvest distributions immediately versus waiting for a dip, what's the difference over a decade?
These aren't hypothetical questions - they have answers, hiding in historical price and dividend data. But to find those answers, you need a tool that lets you model different scenarios against real market data: different portfolios, different contribution schedules, different timing strategies, different rebalancing rules.
I couldn't find that tool. So I'm building it.
What This Service Does
This site lets you build ETF portfolios, set contribution schedules, and run historical "what if" scenarios against real ASX prices and dividend data.
You can model questions like:
- ✓ "What if I'd invested $3,000/month into this portfolio for the last 10 years?"
- ✓ "What if I'd changed my investment day from the 1st to the 15th?"
- ✓ "What if I'd invested a $400,000 lump sum all at once versus spreading it over 6 months?"
- ✓ "What if I'd waited for 5% dips before investing each tranche?"
- ✓ "How does Portfolio A compare to Portfolio B over the same period, with the same contributions?"
It factors in dividends, reinvestment timing, brokerage costs, and different rebalancing strategies. It doesn't tell you what to do - it shows you what would have happened.
About Me
I'm Igor Kryltsov - a product builder and tech entrepreneur based in Sydney. I have a Master's in Applied Mathematics and started a PhD in Artificial Intelligence back in 1993 - a bit early to the market, it turns out. I've spent the two decades since building software, mostly from the founder's seat.
I co-founded Freedcamp, a project-management platform used by millions, where I ran the entire commercial side - support, sales, pricing and the seed raise - single-handedly for years. Before that I founded Deep Shift Labs, building a facilities-management system that ran for over a decade across around 80 aged-care homes.
These days I work in payments. For the past five years I've been at Australian Payments Plus as a product manager and, more recently, a business analyst - where lately I've brought methodical, developer-style practices into the work: writing in markdown, living in VSCode, version-controlling everything in Git, and using the Codex CLI day to day.
YEETF is one of the projects I started in February 2026 and plan to launch later this year, working AI-natively with tools like Claude Code. I'm building it for the same reason I build everything else: I had a question I couldn't answer with anything that already existed.
Next year I'll be shipping four books - you'll find them under the Learn section. The writing is done; what's left is the illustrations and animated widgets, which means teaching myself consistent visual styling and image generation from scratch. I'm also launching SheetLess Piano, a mobile app born from another passion: I've been teaching myself piano since 2005 and never found an app that fit the way I wanted to learn.
I am not a financial adviser. I don't have an AFSL. I built this because I had questions about my own super and couldn't find the answers anywhere.
Igor Kryltsov
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