Retirement
Fromaccumulation todrawdown,bydesign.
Braeside, Victoria
A retirement plan has one job: make sure your money lasts and your income arrives reliably enough that you can live the way you want to live, year after year. The hard part is not the calculation. It is keeping the plan working as your spending changes, as markets do something the model did not assume, and as the rules around super, the age pension and tax move around you over thirty years.
Whether you are five years from retiring or already ten years into it, the conversation we have is the same. We tell you whether your plan works. If you do not have a plan yet, we help you build one.
The thirty-year arc
A retirement plan is not a single decision. It is a sequence of them, calibrated to the phase you are in.
Five phases. Different work in each. Click any phase to see the question that defines it, the work that takes place during it, and the failure mode we most often see.
General illustration only. Not personal financial advice. The phases describe the structure of a long retirement plan; the strategy that applies to your situation is determined through advice.
What we plan around
Three patterns the plan is designed to anticipate.
Most retirement plans that struggle do so for one of a small number of reasons. The plans that work are the ones designed with these in mind from the outset, rather than after they surface. Each of the three below has a known shape, a known cause, and a known set of decisions that account for it.
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01 Spending stays level forever
A couple retires at sixty-two with a plan modelled on level real spending across thirty years. Their actual spending falls by a third by their late seventies and falls again in their eighties. By eighty-five they are sitting on substantially more than they need, having spent the decade in which they were healthiest cautiously, in case the money ran out.
The plan was correct on the math. It was wrong about how spending behaves over time, and the cost of being wrong was years of life lived under more constraint than was necessary.
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02 Sequencing risk realised
A retiree stops working in 2008. The plan was modelled on long-run averages and projected to work over thirty years. Three years of poor returns at the start permanently impair it, even though returns over the full retirement period later average out fine.
The order of returns, not the average, was what determined the outcome. Two plans that look identical on paper end differently depending on which decade the bad years fell in. The first decade of retirement carries weight that no other decade carries.
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03 Structure outliving capacity
A widow inherits the investment structure her husband had built and run for forty years. Five accounts. Three platforms. Two self-managed super funds. A family trust. The structure had worked fine while he was administering it. It became a daily burden the day she was left to run it on her own.
The complexity was not the problem until one of the two people running it was no longer there. Simplification, while capacity is intact, is part of the plan, not separate from it.
The decade before retirement is when most of the plan is decided. The thirty years after are the steady work of keeping it on track.
Get in touch
If retirement is on your horizon, or already arrived, the conversation is the same.
The introductory conversation covers where you are now, where you are trying to get to, and what would have to be true for the plan to work over the long horizon. If you are already retired, we will tell you what we would change about the plan you are running. If you are not yet there, we will tell you what we would put in place.
tim@secureportwealth.com- By telephone
- In person at Braeside
- Travel by arrangement
