Retirement planning is an essential component of long term financial planning.  Unfortunately for most of us, the urgency of retirement planning occurs too late.

Retirement planning requires a long term vision, as well as an understanding of the superannuation rules and regulations both during the accumulation phase and the retirement phase.

The Australian government has encouraged us to utilise the tax effective environment of superannuation to fund our retirement, however with continual changing laws it is easy to be deterred from tipping more than a minimum amount into super.

More and more people are looking at constructive ways to invest their super, and we have seen a significant increase in the number of clients turning toward Self-Managed Super Funds as their preferred retirement vehicle.

It is important to note that superannuation is simply a tax structure for the purpose of retirement planning, so when clients commit to investing more into super, we still provide advice around the underlying investment options.

Of course retirement planning is not exclusively centred around superannuation.  We provide extensive advice to clients who wish to utilise direct property and shares as their retirement vehicle (and may not wish to use a SMSF as the entity to own that property).

Understanding your retirement needs is the starting point for retirement planning.  By projecting your expected income needs forward, a calculation can be made on the amount of money you need to regularly invest now to achieve your retirement goals.