Our Client Stories series explores real scenarios our clients presented us with in the Financial Freedom Service.
We present their unique personal circumstances, explore their pain points and present the high level results of our calculations.
Note: Customer names and some of the details have been adjusted for confidentiality purposes.
Name:
Trish
Age:
62
Employment status:
Recently reduced to part time hours
Occupation:
Researcher
Initial case notes:
- Single female
- Healthy
- Medium cash balance
- Owns primary residence outright
- Nominal share portfolio
- Strong superannuation savings held in an SMSF
Trish hoped to retire in the next 12 months and intended to take annual 3 month trips around Australia for a number of years post retirement.
Why did Trish seek help from Jubilacion?
Trish felt she had planned well and had enough money to retire, however she was unsure how to prove this to herself in order to spend confidently in retirement. She found making her own calculations challenging.
In cutting back to part-time work, Trish experienced her first taste of retirement – and she liked it! Full retirement had quickly become a very serious consideration.
What questions was Trish seeking help with:
Trish’s main questions:
- Did she have enough to live comfortably in retirement (or would she need to live more frugally than hoped)?
- Were her travel plans realistic?
- Could she cease part time work earlier and still achieve these goals?
- Would she be eligible for any government Age Pension? If so, when and how much?
Baseline results:
Jubilacion found that, if markets performed reasonably well, Trish could actually spend more than her goal and still afford to travel. And even if markets performed poorly then Trish’s ‘safe spending’ result was still enough to cover her essential living costs for life.
Using our inbuilt Age Pension calculations, we estimated that Trish would start to become eligible to receive some Age Pension income in around 15 years time. This takes pressure off her own savings.
These results got Trish thinking about the ‘what-ifs’ of her scenario.
Scenario testing:
Trish opted to test 3 scenarios:
- What if she travelled for double the period?
- What if she downsized her home later in life and released equity into her superannuation.
- What if she did both?
Conclusion:
Here’s what Trish thought of the Financial Freedom service:
“After seeing the results, I was confident that I could achieve my goal of retiring. Prior to the meetings I thought I might be close, but I was uncertain and nervous about the possibility of retiring early and running out of money. Finding out that I will be eligible for the age pension in future was a surprise but provides me with a safety net.”
Whilst the results of our calculations don’t always show clients can meet their goals, we love it when they do. Being able to provide people with peace of mind around one of life’s more stressful decisions is a privilege we don’t take for granted.
Does this sound like you? Jubilacion can help!
Get in touch with our friendly staff today and find out how we can provide answers to your unique retirement questions.
DISCLAIMER:
We take measures to ensure all sensitive client information is kept secure and confidential.
As such, we have anonymised customer names and adjusted some case details.
