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31 January 2025
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Debates about retirement tend to focus on the financial aspects: income, tax, estates, wills, and the like. Less attention is paid to the psychological challenges of retirement, which can often be more demanding.
Amid thousands of comments, tips include developing interests to keep occupied, planning in advance to have enough money, staying connected with friends and communities ... should you defer retirement or just do it?
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.
It is useful to think of your financial life and psychological adjustment in five stages: a family and career phase, pre-retirement, close to retirement, just past retirement, and then lifestyle downsizing.
The ideal post retirement product for many combines capital protection with the potential for growth, without high fees and capital charges. The search for the silver bullet goes on.
Less than 15% of Australians will enjoy a 'comfortable' standard of retirement with just their super. The age pension doubles the numbers, but there’s an even larger increase if other savings are included.
It's a difficult task, looking for good ‘inflation plus’ exposure over a long period such as post-retirement. Research into appropriate asset classes shows low correlations make the problem hard to solve.
The super industry has struggled to develop suitable post-retirement products to cater for increases in life expectancy. How would your own investing change if you knew you would live another 30 years after retiring?
Graeme Colley answers a reader’s question on making non-concessional contributions to super after the age of 65, including how the contributions caps work in different situations and how to make the most of them.
Understanding aged care accommodation and the cost is an absolute minefield. The aged care rules are changing on 1 July 2014, and many people have four months to make plans before they are hit by higher costs.
Retirees should consider the best mix of capital preservation, income variability and income requirements, and then be shown how these can be traded against each other with varying degrees of probability.
Anyone who has tried to understand the costs of residential aged care knows how complex it is. Here are tips to navigate the aged care minefield.
The housing market was subdued in 2024, and pessimism abounds as we start the new year. 2025 is likely to be a tale of two halves, with interest rate cuts fuelling a resurgence in buyer demand in the second half of the year.
This examines the performance of key asset classes and sub-sectors in 2024 and over longer timeframes, and the lessons that can be drawn for constructing an investment portfolio for the next decade.
The renowned investor has penned his first investor letter for 2025 and it’s a ripper. He runs through what bubbles are, which ones he’s experienced, and whether today’s markets qualify as the third major bubble of this century.
2024 was a banner year for equities, with a run-up in US tech stocks broadening into a global market rally, and the big question now is whether the good times can continue? History suggests optimism is warranted.
Check out the most-read Firstlinks articles from 2024. From '16 ASX stocks to buy and hold forever', to 'The best strategy to build income for life', and 'Where baby boomer wealth will end up', there's something for all.
Getting regular, growing income from stocks is tougher with the dividend yield on the ASX nearing 25-year lows. Here are some conventional and not-so-conventional ideas for investors wanting to build a dividend portfolio.