The one piece of advice missing from your birth certificate is the expiry date. Yet this would be the single most helpful number for all retirees. If only we knew this date, we’d be able to do our retirement income sums so much more quickly and accurately. And we’d know exactly how much we could spend each year.
There’s a lot of discussion about interest rates – both here and overseas – at the moment. For some retirees higher rates are good news, while for others they can be extremely stressful. The key question is not what is happening in the short term, but how your decades of retirement may be affected.
last week saw indexed increases to the base rate of the Age Pension. Hidden in the coverage were more significant changes; these were increases in the income test threshold and the assets test threshold. Both have been increased and this means either that many Australians will have an increase in their fortnightly income or others will now be eligible for the first time.