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Make sure your income, super, investments and lifestyle plan are aligned before you stop working. Download the complimentary 7 Steps to Retirement Guide from Financial Foundations.
Inside, you’ll find the 7 key areas to think through before retirement - from income planning and super strategy to lifestyle, investments and long-term confidence.
Complete your details and we’ll send the guide directly to your inbox.
For many high-income earners, professionals and business owners, retirement creates a new kind of complexity.
Your income changes. Your investment strategy needs to shift. Your super becomes more important. Tax, estate planning, family priorities and lifestyle decisions all start to overlap.
We help Australians approaching retirement turn complex financial moving parts into a clear, structured plan - so they can make confident decisions before and after they stop working.
You don’t need a pile of disconnected opinions, spreadsheets or product conversations.
You need a clear retirement strategy that brings the major decisions together: income, investments, super, tax-effective structures, lifestyle, risk, estate considerations and family priorities.
The right plan gives you a framework for making decisions - not just at retirement, but throughout the next stage of life.
Understand where your income may come from, how much you may be able to draw, and how to make decisions with more certainty.
Retirement planning isn’t just about your super balance. It’s about how your super, investments, cash reserves, property and other assets support the life you want.
Whether you want to travel, help family, reduce work gradually, sell a business or simply enjoy more freedom, your financial plan should support the way you actually want to live.
When there’s more at stake, generic advice isn’t enough. We help you understand your options, weigh up the trade-offs, and make informed decisions with confidence.
There's no set retirement age in Australia. You can retire whenever you're able to financially support yourself, whether that's a full stop at a set age, a gradual wind-down of hours, or more than one 'retirement' over time.
A commonly used rule of thumb is 70 to 85 per cent of your pre-retirement income, though this varies a lot from person to person. Rather than a single figure like '$1 million', it comes down to building a budget for the retirement lifestyle you want and working backwards from there, which is where financial modelling can help.
A Transition to Retirement strategy lets you draw an income from your super while you're still working, once you've reached your preservation age. It's often used to reduce working hours without a full drop in income, or to salary sacrifice more into super while topping up cash flow from a TTR pension.
An account-based pension is the main way most people turn their super into a retirement income once they stop work. It's tax-effective, flexible on how much you draw (subject to minimum annual drawdown rules), and investment earnings become tax-free after you turn 60 in the retirement phase, up to the transfer balance cap.
Eligibility depends on your age, residency and the value of your assets and income outside your home. The assets test threshold changes periodically and differs for singles, couples and homeowners versus non-homeowners, so it's worth checking your position against the current Services Australia figures or discussing it with an adviser.
Common options include maximising your concessional (before-tax) contributions cap, using 'catch-up' concessional contributions if you haven't used your full cap in previous years, or making non-concessional (after-tax) contributions up to the relevant cap. Which combination makes sense depends on your income, existing balance and timeframe, so it's worth working through with an adviser or accountant.
It depends on your situation, but many people find that, once the tax benefits of super contributions and typical investment returns are weighed against home loan interest, extra super contributions can come out ahead. Where a mortgage is a source of stress rather than just a number, some people choose to prioritise paying it down instead. If it's not cleared before retirement, a tax-free lump sum from super can be used to pay it out once you've retired and reached 60.
Rather than defaulting to a generic 'conservative' or 'growth' label, an investment approach can be built around the return your money actually needs to produce to fund your plans, sometimes called an 'intention-led' approach. Because your super may need to last several decades of retirement, most people still need a meaningful amount of growth assets, not just income-generating ones, to keep pace with drawdowns over time.
This comes down to modelling your likely living costs, travel, asset mix, investment returns and the age you retire, projected forward over your expected retirement. As a general guide, drawing down more than around 6 per cent of your balance a year can increase the risk of running out of money later in retirement, so this is worth stress-testing rather than assuming.
A few things worth checking: whether the adviser or firm holds a current Australian Financial Services Licence (searchable on ASIC's Financial Advisers Register), how much of their work is genuinely focused on retirement rather than general wealth advice, and whether their fee structure is transparent and clearly explained upfront. It's also worth asking how they'd approach your specific mix of super, pension timing and any Centrelink considerations.
Some people manage parts of their own retirement planning, particularly where their situation is straightforward. Where things get more complex, such as combining super drawdown strategy, Centrelink entitlements, tax and investment decisions, many people find it worth having a licensed adviser pressure-test the plan or build it with them, given how much a misstep can cost over a multi-decade retirement.
