Retirement planning
Two questions decide everything: when can you stop working, and how much can you spend once you have? Both are answerable. What most people have instead is a balance, a rough hope, and a quiet worry, and the gap between those and a modelled plan is usually years of working life.
Is this you?
If more than one of these lands, it is worth a conversation. None of them are unusual, and all of them are fixable.
This is the window where decisions still have time to work. Ten years of deliberate strategy changes the outcome materially; ten years of drift mostly does not.
Going from full-time to three days is often more achievable than people assume, and there are structures designed specifically to support it. Most people never find out because they never model it.
Accumulating money and converting it into a reliable income are two completely different problems. The second one is harder, and it is the one that determines whether the money lasts.
It usually is. That fear is best answered with arithmetic rather than reassurance: you either can afford the life you want, or you need to know now while there is still time to adjust.
What we actually do
No open-ended retainer and no vague scope. You know what you are getting and what it costs before we begin.
We project your position year by year to and through retirement, using your actual numbers, then show what changes if you retire earlier, spend more, or live longer than average.
If you want to reduce hours rather than stop, we model whether drawing a limited income from super while still working leaves you better off, and what it costs you long term.
Setting up and structuring a pension from your super, with a drawdown rate that balances the income you want now against the longevity of the balance.
How your drawdown and asset structure affect any Age Pension entitlement, because the two interact, and ignoring one while planning the other leaves money behind.
Worth understanding
Not a sales pitch: the handful of things that genuinely change the outcome, including the ones that are expensive to discover late.
These get confused constantly. Preservation age is when you can access your own superannuation: it is 60 for everyone now reaching it. Age Pension age is when you may become eligible for a government payment, and it is 67. There is a seven-year gap, and how you fund it is often the whole plan.
Two retirees can experience identical average returns over twenty years and end up in completely different positions, purely because of when the bad years fell. A poor sequence early in retirement, while you are drawing an income, does far more damage than the same sequence later. This is called sequencing risk, and it is the main argument for reducing risk as you approach the transition rather than after it.
Life expectancy is a median. By definition roughly half of people live longer, and for a couple the odds that at least one of you does are higher still. A plan that runs out at exactly average is a plan with a fifty percent failure rate.
Spending is usually highest early, covering travel, the deferred projects and helping adult children, then settles, then rises again later with health costs. A flat spending assumption is tidy and wrong, and it tends to understate what you need in the years you were most looking forward to.
Common questions
General information only, and not personal advice. What applies to you depends on your circumstances.
There is no single figure, and any number quoted without knowing your circumstances is marketing. It depends on the lifestyle you want, when you stop, whether you still owe anything, what other assets you hold, whether you are single or part of a couple, and what Age Pension you may qualify for. What we do instead is model your actual position and show you the projected outcome, including what changes if you retire earlier or spend more than planned.
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Get started
Tell us where you are with retirement planning and what you would like to sort out. If we can help, we will explain exactly how and what it costs.
