Kaye Fallick, Author at Retirement Essentials

Government health entitlements: Your 2025 wellbeing checklist

One of our most popular articles last year was a guide to Putting your health first, by author and academic, Professor Cassandra Szoeke.

It’s well worth your time clicking on the link to reread Cassandra’s helpful insights. While the main focus of Retirement Essentials remains your financial health, we also urge you to prioritise your physical and mental wellbeing. To quote a well-worn saying – ‘There’s no point in being the richest man or woman in the cemetery’. To support you in this endeavour, we have created a handy list of health services provided by federal and state governments as well as some specific programs for older Australians.

We hope you find this reminder useful and encourage you to share it with any friends or loved ones you feel it might benefit as well. We all often neglect our health at the expense of other, seemingly, more important activities. But that’s not generally the best set of priorities. In fact, taking our health for granted is a risky plan. Putting your health first, second and third in 2025 will provide a firm foundation for all the other ‘must-dos’ in your life.

But first, a note of caution. The following summary is far from exhaustive. The Federal and state governments sponsored HealthDirect website provides much more detailed information, with a comprehensive list of checks for people aged 60, 70 and over.

Retirement calculators: Serious failures in super fund offerings

by Kaye Fallick | Superannuation

There is often a lot of faith placed in the ability of technology – increasingly AI – to quickly and efficiently solve many financial planning problems. This is particularly the case with retirement income calculators, often considered low hanging fruit within the financial services sector. You can see the appeal of offering such DIY tools. With nearly three million people predicted to retire over the next decade, having pre-retirees do their own projections might relieve super funds of a whole lot of work and responsibility. To be fair, it’s also a way of putting the customer/fund member in the driving seat for their own retirement wellbeing, so it makes some sense. But what if these calculators aren’t totally reliable? That would be a whole other thing, wouldn’t it.

And that’s the conclusion reached in research undertaken by Super Consumers Australia (SCA) and published in September this year. In case you’re not aware of this organisation, it’s an independent, not-for-profit advocacy group on behalf of superannuation savers with low or middle incomes. SCA is partially funded through Federal Government grants and partners with the Choice organisation.

This year the SCA set out to test the usefulness of both retail and industry superannuation fund calculators. That’s because two-thirds of funds claim that this is how they plan to help members transition to retirement, by encouraging members to use calculators to understand how their savings will fund their later years.

Somewhat surprisingly, of the 50 largest funds reviewed, SCA found that only 25 offered a publicly-available calculator. Another eight provided a link directly to the calculator on the government’s Moneysmart website.

Five biggest Age Pension mistakes and how to avoid them

by Kaye Fallick | Centrelink Age Pension

When an entitlement such as the Age Pension has been in place for more than a century, it’s tempting to assume that the rules are well-known and easy to follow. Not so, unfortunately. Every day the Retirement Essentials Customer Services Team hears from retirees who either didn’t know about rules or didn’t thoroughly understand them, much to their financial detriment.

As you know the team at Retirement Essentials is dedicated to helping to make things as easy as possible for those who are planning for or living in retirement. Today we share a summary of five aspects of Age Pension eligibility that continue to confound applicants and result in lower fortnightly payments. These mistakes run the gamut from timing, reporting, complexity of the means test and partner rules to how to value your assets.