Carla Harris, the co-founder and CEO of Longevity App talks about her journey and her motivations to create this app.

It is no secret that women are at a significant disadvantage in retirement, retiring with nearly half the superannuation as men, and estimated to outlive their super by more than 12 years. 

While the reasons behind this gap are multifaceted (and therefore will take some time to fix), recognising this unacceptable gap propelled me to launch Longevity App to help Australian women boost their retirement savings in a simple and manageable way.

Longevity App is an automated super savings tool that allows users to boost their existing super with a small amount extra, in accordance with their everyday spending – think spending $100 at Coles and having $1 or 1 per cent automatically accrue to go into your super.

If you consider that women make 80 per cent of purchasing decisions but retire with around 42 per cent less super than men, Longevity App glues these two concepts together, allowing users to top up their super just through regular purchasing. You may not be adding much at a time but thanks to the wonders of compounding, a few cents here and a few dollars there can really make a difference in retirement.

Australians deserve a non-intrusive but highly valuable way to look after their future selves, and technology is positioned better than ever to help do just that.

If you’re interested in enhancing your knowledge in the money and super department, but are not sure where to get started, here are a few things you might want to consider:

1.  Books: Effie Zahos’s A Real Girl’s Guide to Money and Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor are always good staples.
2.  A great new podcast (and Facebook group), She’s on the Money covers everything from Afterpay addictions to “Investing 101”.
3.  If looking further into your super is a goal for you (go you!) as a start, ensure you’ve only got one super account to avoid paying multiple sets of fees. Plus, a bigger super balance from combining will work harder as a larger lump sum. Also check out how your super fund is performing and how high the fees are (a bit of a Google search can generally get to the bottom of it). If your fund is underperforming, maybe it’s time to look for a better one?
4.  It’s due time to close the gap in our retirement savings, without feeling the pinch or needing to make lifestyle sacrifices. 

Longevity App wants to provide everyone the opportunity to live their best life in retirement, not just half of the population. And with the value of compound interest and some little behavioural changes, we can start to make a really meaningful difference to our super, one cent at a time.

Note: Commentary provided by Longevity App is general information only and is not intended to act as specific financial advice.