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Monday, 25 October 2021
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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.
1997 Nobel Laureate Robert Merton wants greater focus on the income that will sustain a retirement, and even Jane Austen understood this. And he has a surprising proposal to help with longevity risk.
With more people living longer, retirement expectations are being reshaped and redefined. Now is the time to consider the financial and cultural solutions for making the most out of the gift of a longer life.
Important retirement planning lessons benefit from actual experience, given that life does not follow a predictable pattern and many people can’t work forever. Planning is vital but so is making adjustments.
Adequate retirement incomes rely on accumulating superannuation balances throughout a working life, and many factors are detrimental to women keeping pace with men. Urgent reform is needed.
There's a gap between the age when many people are considered too old to start a new job, and qualifying for the age pension. It leaves those who do not own their home especially vulnerable.
Retirement isn't what it used to be, especially for those whose job gave them purpose, pride and self-esteem. After full-time work, strategies are required to stay engaged and energised.
The last major stage of life is a chance to do something we are passionate about. In ‘elderhood’ (post-adulthood) we have the time and relative freedom to make more choices, for as long as our health allows.
Relevancy, as long as we maintain it, is rewarding on almost every level. But what happens when we lose it? As we get older, we need to master irrelevancy, the exact opposite of what we’ve spent a lifetime pursuing.
Nobel laureate Robert Merton wants us to focus on the income that will sustain us in retirement, even Jane Austen understood this. And he has a surprising proposal to help with longevity risk.
With years in retirement increasing and the tendency of modern retirees to be fitter and healthier, we find there's more to life than sitting back and watching the world go by. In fact, it's almost impossible.
Depending on your own situation, 60 might be the new 50 or the new 70. When it comes to making decisions about retirement, aged-based rules might not be as useful as once thought.
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?
We tend to forget that house prices often fall. Direct lending controls are more effective than rate rises because macroprudential limits affect the volume of money for housing leaving business rates untouched.
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?
Any policy decision needs to recognise who is affected by a change. It pays to check the data on who pays taxes, who owns assets and who earns the income to ensure an equitable and efficient outcome.
With articles on the pensions assets test read about 40,000 times, 3,500 survey responses and thousands of comments, there was a lot of great reader participation. A few comments added extra insights.
It is hard to think of any area of widespread public concern where the same policies have been pursued for so long, in the face of such incontrovertible evidence that they have failed to achieve their objectives.