Kaye Fallick

Kaye is a retirement commentator and coach, with 25 years’ experience writing about retirement income. She has authored two books on life stage changes – Get a New Life and What Next? – and enjoys regular radio and podcast appearances. Her favourite mission is to offer plain English explanations of complex rules so that all retirees can benefit. She is based in Melbourne but enjoys escaping to Italy whenever possible.
Are you feeling stressed in retirement?

Are you feeling stressed in retirement?

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A recent report claims Australian retirees are stressed and that a government product would solve this problem. That’s a big statement, so today we are digging a bit deeper to see what the claimed problem is – and whether the suggested solution would be helpful.

The report Simpler Super: Taking the stress out of retirement was published by the Grattan Institute on 19 January. Authored by Brendan Coates, Joey Moloney and Esther Suckling it starts with the rather compelling statement that:

“Australia makes superannuation too complex for retirees”. It then builds a case that most Australians are hands-off about building super, but when it comes to drawing an income from these savings they struggle to understand how to combine it with an Age Pension, how long they will live, how investments might perform and how to ‘get value from their super fund’.

How your super performed

How your super performed

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Are you optimising your super? Last week research house, SuperRatings, released the annual returns for Australian super funds in Calendar Year 2024. The funds posted positive returns in 10 of the 12 months in 2024. The results are very positive and are good news for...

Could this retirement crystal ball reduce the fear of running out?

Could this retirement crystal ball reduce the fear of running out?

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What if you had a crystal ball? Would that help you eliminate your FORO – the fear of running out?

I’ve been writing about retirement income for nearly 25 years now (yes, let’s agree that I started when I was a teenager, NOT!). But all jokes aside, there are two observations that haven’t changed over time. These are two related, but very different, research findings:

Almost 50% of retirees do not know if their money will last across retirement or whether they will outlive their savings (most recently reported by Vanguard in How Australia Retires, 2024)

Those who have received financial advice are twice as likely to be confident they will have enough money across their retirement (from The Value of Advice, CPA, 2020) 

Over the years I have been covering retirement income, these two findings have remained consistent across diverse sources of research which cover all socio-economic groups. 

So it’s worth posing the question whether there is a there is a useful link to be made between the two. 

Can we reconcile the enhanced confidence of those who has received advice with a much lower level of the fear of running out?