When engaging a financial planner for your “Golden Aged” planning, being retirement, estate and aged care planning there are some fundamental rules to follow; Beth Hourigan, Director ACF Services, Financial and Investment Planning, shares some of her industry insights below.
Experience and capability – Seek an established team with a track record providing all of life personalised aged care financial planning advice; ensure they have the highest standard of professional advice, and who adhere to comprehensive compliance, education and industry standards.
Simplicity and Easiness – Be involved throughout the entire process, and be sure that your financial plan is easily understood, using easy language and terms to explain recommendations and strategies.
Accessible – Ensure your chosen aged care financial planner is accessible and can provide you the on-going support to implement, review and evaluate your plan against objectives and at regular (agreed) intervals. Access should be in person, over the phone or on-line conferencing.
Transparency – The planning process, the financial plan and all costs involved should be clearly explained up front, and as agreed prior to commitment or implementation, so there’ll be no surprises.
Personalisation – Whether it’s one-off or ongoing advice, personalised financial plan should be customised to help reach individual goals, and can be adjusted to address situational changes.
Choice of products – Investment and insurance options should be recommended as appropriate and potentially including a range of high quality options offered by impartial financial institutions in Australia and globally, if appropriate.
During retirement it’s important to maintain exposure to growth assets, as well as reliable income streams, to ensure higher long-term average returns. Care needs to be taken by your financial planner to provide growth assets to grow, in order to provide dependable cash flow that lasts as long as retirement.
Most people want to know how much super they need to retire comfortably; and that depends on how well they want to live, what they spend, and whether they’re satisfied relying on the Age Pension at any stage. It also depends on how much risk they decide to take on investment strategies.
- No-one can predict how long they will live but we all want our savings to last the distance in retirement.
- Fortunately there are simple tools to help us estimate a realistic life expectancy, which means we have a better chance of effectively planning for our retirement. Most financial planners have access to tested tools that help them to model strategies specifically to meet their client’s objectives.
- Investing small equal amounts regularly over time, or dollar cost averaging, is a common strategy used to build up superannuation. It can be a cost-effective way to buffer the highs and lows of the share market.
- It might seem that the same ‘averaging out’ benefit should also apply when drawing down superannuation for regular pension payments, but the near-universal need for retirees to make regular drawdowns can actually increases the risk of superannuation running out too soon so the strategy needs to cover the Golden Aged of life.
