RETIREMENT PLANNING

There are several things to consider when planning your retirement – such as the lifestyle you would like to have, where you wish to live, how much income you will need to fund these decisions and the best way to transition to retirement. It is therefore important to plan to ensure you are prepared.

We recommend you seek professional advice as part of your preparation for retirement to ensure you maximise your savings and assets in a tax effective way.

Pre-Retirement
Now that you have fewer financial commitments, your focus has shifted to security in retirement and retirement plans. You may wish to salary sacrifice to your super fund or start a Transition to Retirement pension. You may also start to think about your investments and how they will be handed down to your family.

Our Adviser can help you identify your lifestyle requirements in retirement to come up with a retirement income goal. A review of your current superannuation and superannuation arrangements may be required to help ensure your retirement goals can be met. Our Adviser can also advise you on estate planning considerations and develop an effective plan to ensure your wealth ends up in the right hands in the most effective way for tax purposes.

Retirees
With 20 years or more of retirement ahead of you, you will wish to maintain your lifestyle once your salary or other employment income stops. If you have savings and investments, you will need to generate enough income from them to meet your expenses without having to access your assets. You’ll want to pay as little tax as possible once you retire so you have more to spend or save. You may be entitled to an age pension and possibly not aware of Centrelink benefits available to you.

The first focus is to ensure your investments and superannuation are managed to meet your income goals to fund the lifestyle you have worked for. Our Adviser can also provide information on Centrelink entitlements to supplement your retirement income and determine your eligibility.

However other areas of advice including aged care advice and estate planning perhaps become more significant and you may wish to put in place a Power of Attorney. You may be concerned about assisting your children and grandchildren financially.

Longevity risk may be something you haven’t considered. Most people have the goal of ensuring that their capital will last for their lifetime and provide them their desired income and flexibility to meet changes in housing and health needs and for some there is the goal of having some left over for their families at the end of the day.

Unfortunately none of us know how long that lifetime will be and surviving longer than your money is what we refer to as longevity risk. You may be interested in visiting the My Longevity website and taking 10 minutes to complete their questionnaire. This questionnaire provides a “guestimate” of what age you might live to, based on a number of lifestyle factors and we hope it highlights the issue of managing your money with what Financial Planners call longevity risk in mind.