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Saturday, 25 September 2021
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Retirees require a reliable income stream to replace the wages they received when they were working and should focus on the dollar income generated over time rather than the headline yield percentage.
Last year's retiree checklist of services available was one of our most popular articles. There are some additions for 2021, and while it can take effort to set them up, they can pay off over the long term.
The deteriorating mood will bring changes that will have profound economic, financial, social and political changes that can be grouped into new, accelerated, busted and possible trends.
This list could save a retiree thousands of dollars and provides ideas for a better lifestyle. It's surprising what you might be entitled to, but it's often hard to track down the benefits.
Grattan has released a response to the above Mercer critique, with this short summary of their position and the longer paper attached. The coming retirement review will need to cope with such diversity of opinions.
Retirement is not a steady state of more time for holidays and family. Planning must allow for the onset of part-disability and disability, and costs can rise significantly in the final 'frailty' years.
Both before and after retirement, there are actions most people can take to improve the chances of attaining a desired lifestyle after paid work finishes.
It's no surprise that increasing living costs (food, energy, health care) are impacting retirees on modest incomes the most. Early planning and saving is needed to be 'retirement-ready'.
Urban growth poses many challenges. The way we live and interact as a society, especially in growing cities, will continue to evolve including the way we shop, how we move around and how land is redeveloped.
Investors need to be aware of what’s happening to productivity and how this will affect future returns and the affordability of tax-payer funded pensions, especially if company profits fall.
Despite the publicity about long life expectancy, research on Australian retirement highlights a lack of planning, and most people do not determine their own retirement date.
Confidence is important but can be misleading in terms of what is actually going on. Our emotions, which make us human, need to be balanced by facts, especially when we think times are grim.
The RBA Governor says rising house prices are due to "the design of our taxation and social security systems". The OECD says "the prolonged boom in house prices has inflated the wealth of many pensioners without impacting their pension eligibility." What's your view?
It's a remarkable statistic. In any year since 1875, if you had invested in the Australian stock index, turned away and come back eight years later, your average return would be 120% with no negative periods.
Never stand between Australian households and an uncapped government programme with $3 billion in ‘free money’ to build or renovate their homes. But excess supply is coming with an absence of net migration.
Picking macro trends is difficult. What may seem logical and compelling one minute may completely change a few months later. There are better rewards from focussing on identifying the best companies at good prices.
Critics of franking credits are missing the main point. The taxable income of shareholders/taxpayers must also include the company tax previously paid to the ATO before the dividend was distributed. It is fair.
The survey drew a fantastic 2,000 responses with over 1,000 comments and polar opposite views on what is good policy. Do most people believe the home should be in the age pension asset test, and what do they say?