Can super secure women’s future?
Here are some stark numbers on the difference between men and women at the point when they retire: 80% of women are retiring without the super balance they need to fund a comfortable lifestyle. On retirement, women’s average superannuation account balance is around $70,000 less than men.[1] To be balanced, we should remember there are…
Retirement planning? Even multimillionaires can run out of money
Once upon a time in the U.S., not long ago, the “4% rule” was a reasonable (albeit very general) rule of thumb for everyone (including the wealthy) planning their retirement. You probably could expect to spend around 4% of your assets annually and be unlikely to run out of money during the rest of your…
Navigating uncertainty in retirement
While wealth transfer from one generation to the next is putting pressure on financial planning practices to attract younger clients, there’s no doubt that advice during the retirement years is still a mainstay of the profession. With draft retirement income covenant legislation expected to make its way through Federal Parliament by July 2022, there is…
Retirement: How to beat inflation
Investors with long memories – or a good education – will recall the bad old days when inflation was the economic bogeyman. It broke Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1930s and nearly cratered America’s economy in the 1970s. Fortunately, inflation has been a non-issue in Western economies for decades. But is that about to change?…
Risk in retirement: finding the right balance
For many of us, retirement means dream holidays, reading books and spending time with grandchildren. However for some Australians, the notion of enjoying their golden years after a lifetime of hard work hit a roadblock last year when COVID-19 struck, and hit economies and markets hard. Many businesses were affected by COVID-19 and the associated…
How To Set Up A Portfolio From Scratch
Truth be told most of us want double-digit returns on our investments each year, and we don’t ever want to lose money. And in our naive way we try to achieve this aim by randomly choosing fast-moving stocks, blindly following trends and generally taking on too much risk. When we don’t earn double digit returns…
Disastrous retirement strategies
We all know that there is no such thing as a low risk, high growth investment product, which provides a guaranteed return. And we also know that in order to maintain a good lifestyle in retirement, our super savings need to be fairly substantial. But many Australians continue to play Russian roulette with their retirement…
Measures of happiness tell us less than economics of unhappiness
John Quiggin, The University of Queensland This article is part of a series, On Happiness, examining what it means and how it might be achieved in the 21st century. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it does…
Borrowing to invest a risky solution to a savings problem
By Wealth Foundations Borrowing to invest has appeal to some high income professionals The Global Financial Crisis clearly revealed the dangers of attempting to accelerate wealth accumulation by borrowing to invest. Many were left owing considerably more to their lenders than their investment assets were worth. However, for many high income earning professionals in their…
Explainer: what are safe haven investments?
By Richard Heaney, University of Western Australia Safe haven investments are investments that provide a low level of risk during periods of extreme economic uncertainty. The problem is that a safe haven investment is a safe haven investment until it is no longer a safe haven investment. There are a number of assets that are…
