Retirement Income Strategy – how to

29 March 2022

The Australian Government is proposing that from 1 July 2022 all public offer super funds (those that anybody can join) must have a documented Retirement Income Strategy for retired members, or those approaching retirement. This is not required for Self-Managed Superannuation Fund (SMSF) but it is something that should be seriously thought about by SMSF Trustees – the process of drawing down money from the SMSF for living expenses in retirement is what an SMSF is all about.

The aim of the strategy is to assist the SMSF members to:
➢ maximise their retirement income, taking into account the Age Pension;
➢ manage risks to the stability and sustainability of their income; and
➢ have some flexible access to savings in retirement.

To help better understand why SMSFs will benefit from a Retirement Income Strategy.  We’ve produced a step-by-step guide to help with this process. 

This document starts by giving some of the background.  SMSF members can assess various retirement scenarios so they can come up with a sensible Retirement Income Strategy.  Various methods are available to generate these scenarios, ASIC’s MoneySmart tool is one of the basic ones.  But to be properly effective, more is needed.

We base our discussion on mProjections’ Investment Options Report. If you haven’t already seen one of these, you can read about them here.

Click above to download the full report