Retirement planning

Start with the number, not the strategy

The useful first step is not a product or a portfolio. It is an honest figure for what you spend, and a modelled view of what your current assets produce against it. Most people are some distance from where they assumed they were, in one direction or the other, and knowing which changes what you should do next.

We build that picture from what you actually hold — super, property, business value, anything outside super — rather than from a rule of thumb.

Preservation age and the conditions of release

You cannot access super simply because you have stopped working. You need to have met a condition of release, and which one applies depends on your age and your circumstances. The ATO's guidance on accessing your super sets out the conditions.

The practical consequence is that timing is rarely fully in your control, and plans that assume otherwise tend to come apart.

Moving from accumulation to pension

Starting an account-based pension moves your super from the accumulation phase into the retirement phase, where earnings on the supporting assets are generally untaxed. There is a cap on how much can be transferred, and once you have started a pension you must draw a minimum amount each year based on your age.

That minimum is a genuine constraint. In a year when markets are down, drawing it means selling assets you would rather have held. Planning for that is more useful than being surprised by it.

Transition to retirement

A transition-to-retirement income stream lets you draw on super while still working once you have reached preservation age. It suits some people and does very little for others; the difference usually comes down to your marginal tax rate and whether you are genuinely reducing your hours.

It is not a universally good idea, and it was oversold for years. We will tell you plainly if it does not do much in your case.

The Age Pension is part of the picture

Few people fund retirement entirely from their own assets, and the Age Pension's income and assets tests interact with what you hold and how you hold it. Services Australia publishes the current thresholds; Moneysmart's retirement income guidance is a reasonable starting point for the general position.

Because the means tests treat different assets differently, this is one of the places where structure genuinely matters — and where advice that ignores it produces a worse outcome than no advice at all.

The trade-off worth seeing

For most couples the decision comes down to three levers: when you stop, what you spend, and how the money is drawn in the early years. They are not independent, and the third is the one people rarely consider.

Two more years of work does not simply add two years of contributions. It removes two years of drawings, shortens the period the capital has to last, and — if markets are poor at the point you retire — avoids selling into them. That last effect is called sequencing risk, and it is why two people with identical balances and identical spending can end up in materially different positions.

We will not put a number on your outcome here, because a number without the assumptions behind it is worth nothing: the answer moves on your spending, your asset mix, fees, inflation, how long you live and what the Age Pension pays you. What we do is model your figures, show what each lever is worth in your case, and show what a poor first few years would do to it.