Most people do not arrive at retirement with a clear answer. They arrive with a super balance, a rough idea of what they spend each month, a hope that the numbers will work out, and not much else. That gap between hoping and knowing is where most retirement decisions go wrong.
The question of readiness is not really about age. It is about whether your money will last and whether your income will hold up against inflation once your earning power drops to zero. Working through those questions properly takes more than a calculator on a super fund’s website.
Is Your Super Balance the Right Question to be Asking?
Super balance gets all the attention because it is the easiest number to point at. The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia suggests a couple needs around $690,000 at retirement to fund a comfortable lifestyle, assuming they own their home outright and draw a part Age Pension. For singles, the figure sits near $595,000.
Those numbers are useful as a benchmark. They are not useful as a personal answer. Two couples with identical super balances can have completely different retirement outcomes depending on their spending habits, health, mortgage status, and how their money is invested.
A more useful question is: how much income will you actually need each year, and where is it coming from? If you spend $80,000 a year now and want to maintain that lifestyle, your retirement plan has to generate roughly that amount after tax for 25 to 30 years. That is the calculation that matters.
What Do People Underestimate the Most?
Healthcare and aged care costs catch most retirees off guard. Private health insurance premiums climb steadily, out-of-pocket medical expenses accumulate, and the average aged care residency in Australia involves a Refundable Accommodation Deposit that often runs above $400,000, on top of ongoing daily care fees.
Tax in retirement is the other surprise. Many retirees assume they stop paying tax once they leave work. If you have money outside super, hold an investment property, draw from a transition-to-retirement pension before age 60, or own shares with franking credits, you are still in the tax system. The structure of your assets matters as much as the size of them.
Inflation gets dismissed because the official CPI figure looks small. Over a 25-year retirement, even modest inflation roughly halves your purchasing power. A retirement income that feels generous in 2026 will feel tight by 2046 if it has not been built to grow.
When is the Right Time to Get Professional Advice?
The honest answer is earlier than most people think. The decisions that have the biggest impact on retirement outcomes are usually made in your 50s, not your 60s. Salary sacrifice strategy, contribution caps, downsizer contributions, the timing of when you stop working, and how your super is invested in the lead-up to drawdown all compound significantly over a decade.
If you are within ten years of stopping work and you have not had a proper conversation with someone independent, that is the gap worth closing. Working with a retirement financial planner who has no product agenda and no commission structure means the advice you receive is based on your situation rather than on what an institution wants to sell that quarter.
The other trigger point is any major change. A redundancy package, an inheritance, a partner’s death, or a property sale all shift the equation. Decisions made in those moments without proper modelling tend to leak money for years afterwards.
How Do You Stress-Test a Retirement Plan?
A real plan should survive bad scenarios, not just average ones. Run the numbers against a market downturn in your first five years of retirement. Run them against living to 95. Run them against one partner needing residential aged care for several years. Run them against a long stretch of below-average returns.
If the plan only works when markets behave and nobody gets sick, it is not a plan. It is a forecast.
Sequencing risk is the technical term for what happens when markets fall heavily early in retirement. If you are drawing down from a portfolio that has just dropped 30%, you lock in losses you never recover from. Strategies to manage this exist, including bucket structures, cash reserves, conservative drawdown rates in the first few years, and defensive asset allocation in the lead-up to retirement, but they have to be set up before the downturn, not after.
What about the Age Pension?
A surprising number of retirees with substantial super balances still qualify for at least a part Age Pension. The asset and income tests have thresholds that change regularly, and the way assets are structured can move someone in or out of eligibility.
For a homeowning couple, the assets test cuts off at around $1.05 million in 2026, but the test treats different asset classes differently. Your home is exempt. Lifetime annuities and certain pension structures receive favourable treatment. The way you hold cash, shares, property, and any defined-benefit entitlement is not neutral.
This is one of the areas where a few hours of planning can be worth tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a retirement. Most people do not realise their plan is leaving Centrelink money on the table until someone walks them through it.
What Should You Be Asking a Planner Before You Engage?
A few questions matter most. Are you independent of product providers? How do you charge, and is there any commission involved? Can you show me a worked example of a plan for someone in a similar position to mine? And what happens to my plan if you retire or leave the firm?
The answers tell you most of what you need to know. An adviser who hesitates on the first question is probably tied to a product list, and one who cannot give you a clean answer on fees is hiding something. The one who cannot show you what their work actually looks like is asking you to take their competence on faith.
Retirement planning is a long-term relationship. The person sitting across the table from you should be someone you can imagine still working with in fifteen years, calmly adjusting your plan as your circumstances change. That fit matters as much as the technical advice.
