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24 August 2025
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Debates about retirement tend to focus on the financial aspects: income, tax, estates, wills, and the like. Less attention is paid to the psychological challenges of retirement, which can often be more demanding.
Amid thousands of comments, tips include developing interests to keep occupied, planning in advance to have enough money, staying connected with friends and communities ... should you defer retirement or just do it?
Pre-retirees should ‘trial run’ their retirements. All those things you want to do - play golf, time with the family, a hobby, write a book - might not be so appealing in reality, but you might discover other benefits.
It is useful to think of your financial life and psychological adjustment in five stages: a family and career phase, pre-retirement, close to retirement, just past retirement, and then lifestyle downsizing.
The ideal post retirement product for many combines capital protection with the potential for growth, without high fees and capital charges. The search for the silver bullet goes on.
Less than 15% of Australians will enjoy a 'comfortable' standard of retirement with just their super. The age pension doubles the numbers, but there’s an even larger increase if other savings are included.
It's a difficult task, looking for good ‘inflation plus’ exposure over a long period such as post-retirement. Research into appropriate asset classes shows low correlations make the problem hard to solve.
The super industry has struggled to develop suitable post-retirement products to cater for increases in life expectancy. How would your own investing change if you knew you would live another 30 years after retiring?
Graeme Colley answers a reader’s question on making non-concessional contributions to super after the age of 65, including how the contributions caps work in different situations and how to make the most of them.
Understanding aged care accommodation and the cost is an absolute minefield. The aged care rules are changing on 1 July 2014, and many people have four months to make plans before they are hit by higher costs.
Retirees should consider the best mix of capital preservation, income variability and income requirements, and then be shown how these can be traded against each other with varying degrees of probability.
Anyone who has tried to understand the costs of residential aged care knows how complex it is. Here are tips to navigate the aged care minefield.
Each generation believes its economic challenges were uniquely tough - but what does the data say? A closer look reveals a more nuanced, complex story behind the generational hardship debate.
The Labor government is talking up tax reform to lift Australia’s ailing economic growth. Before any changes are made, it’s important to know who pays tax, who owns assets, and how much people have in their super for retirement.
Australia could unlock smarter investment and greater equity by reforming housing tax concessions. Rethinking exemptions on the family home could benefit most Australians, especially renters and owners of modest homes.
This goes through the different options including shares, property and business ownership and declares a winner, as well as outlining the mindset needed to earn enough to never have to work again.
Everyone has a theory as to why housing in Australia is so expensive. There are a lot of different factors at play, from skewed migration patterns to banking trends and housing's status as a national obsession.
China's steel production, equivalent to building one Sydney Harbour Bridge every 10 minutes, has driven Australia's economic growth. With China's slowdown, what does this mean for Australia's economy and investments?