What you believe will help
Our regular Retirement Pulse surveys never fail to surprise. Yes, they always deliver useful insights and help us understand your key concerns. But they also often deliver useful solutions to problems that plague retirees across the spectrum. The November 2023 Retirement Pulse responses were not different. We’ve now received more than 500 responses and are pleased to share the insights.
We posed just five questions.
The one which drew the most emphatic response was Question Five, where we asked you to agree or disagree to the statement:
‘I would like more information and support to manage my retirement finances’.
Almost three quarters of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with this proposition.
Question Two explored the type of support that retirees may find most helpful to alleviate the fear of that most distressing syndrome – FORO or Fear of Running Out.
The answers favoured useful projection tools to see how savings could be affected by spending and external scenarios:
- 40% of respondents favoured a ‘scenario planning tool’ to show what would happen to their savings and investments under a range of different scenarios
- 32% favoured a ‘safe spending plan’ that would show how much you could safely spend for the rest of your life, and
- 20% wished to use a ‘retirement income forecaster’ to project what their income would be for the duration of their lives.
It seems we may have erred on the side of modesty when it comes to sharing the full suite of Retirement Essentials services, as we offer tailored consultations with our advisers to step our members through each of the above tools already! A retirement forecasting consultation can take you through any of these tools and help with your planning.
We also asked, on a scale from extremely satisfied to extremely dissatisfied, how you would rate the following Retirement Essentials services and were pleased to have a high average response across Age Pension and Commonwealth Seniors Health Card applications, Retirement planning and forecasting advice consultations. And that the weekly newsletter remains an extremely popular feature with 80% of members either somewhat or extremely satisfied with this retirement income update.
And lastly, of ongoing interest is the source of information on retirement income advice. We were delighted to be the main source for just over 60% of our members, with members’ super funds ranking well at 50%. Next most popular sources were websites (40%), followed by newspapers and magazines (30%). ‘Second tier’ sources of advice included financial advisers (28%), friends and family (20%) and accountants (17%). Interestingly social media as a source of retirement income advise barely rated (at 6%). For all the ‘hoo ha’ over social media it seems that our members do not believe it is a useful form of information when it comes to their savings.
This week we are asking a couple more related questions in a ‘Part Two’ Retirement Pulse survey – we hope you will again jump online for five minutes and share your wisdom.
Are you one of the members who believe that more knowledge could help alleviate your concerns about running out of money in retirement? If so we invite you to join one of our experienced advisers as they guide you through the following:
• Scenario planning
• Safe spending
• Retirement income forecasts
