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4 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.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers aims to tackle tax reform but faces challenges. Previous reviews struggled due to political sensitivities, highlighting the need for comprehensive and politically feasible change.
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.
With Div. 296 looming, is there a smarter way to tax superannuation? This proposes a fairer, income-linked alternative that respects compounding, ensures predictability, and avoids taxing unrealised capital gains.
There are many ways to invest in stocks, but some strategies are more effective than others. Here are nine tried and tested investment approaches - choosing one of these can improve your chances of reaching your financial goals.
In selling the super tax, Labor has repeated Treasury claims of there being $50 billion in super tax concessions annually, mostly flowing to high-income earners. This figure is vastly overstated.
Markets have weathered geopolitical turmoil, hitting near record highs. Investors face tough decisions on valuations, asset concentration, and strategic portfolio rebalancing for risk control and future returns.