Running a trust is not hard - your accountant or even e-super will take care of that to a large extent
As Lindso stated - focus on your investments - as the trustee of a fund, yes, you are responsible but you will have professional backing to assist with the trust / legal / compliance aspect
Remember - the key reasons people opt for a SMSF are: - flexibility; and - control (SMSF's are relatively cheap but shouldn't be the main driver)
Avoid % of funds under management like the plague - eg I administer a fund worth over $1m in pension and charge less than 2k - if I ran 0.80% then I'd collect $8k in fees but I don't need to - it's a really clean fund - I also administer a fund of $1m for 8k (every single transaction needs to be converted from either yen, usd or pounds - the fund holds +100 separate direct foreign investments) - as you can see it's a matter of horses for courses - you keep it simple, it's cheap - you go complex, then more expensive (% of funds under management is a scam)
Regardless of value though, there's a base cost of having a SMSF - you mentioned you're a tight wad - but if you had control of the investments would you have lost 60k (even if the fees were more than 2k in a SMSF)
PS - at a professional level I can't compete on a pure cost basis with e-super (or some other providers) and never will - don't need to - eg a client came to me recently with 500k taxable income - by looking at the accounts from a different angle, the lodged taxable income was NIL((not rocket science, just basic knowledge - the point being (I'm sure some members are sick of reading this and probably have me on ignore) - the cheapest product is not always the best))
