Give yourself more flexibility in the lead up to retirement

Give yourself more flexibility in the lead up to retirement

Nowadays, we’re living for years longer than ever before.  60 is no longer old age!  So it makes sense that you want flexibility in retirement in a way that suits you.  A transition to retirement strategy enables you to access part of your super while you are still working and has a number of benefits.

Boost your super and supplement your income

There are two main benefits of a transition to flexibility in retirement strategy:

• Maximising your super
  You can continue to work while drawing an income from an account-based pension.  By doing this you can salary sacrifice as much of your pre-tax salary to super as possible while receiving an income from your pension.  This allows you to increase your retirement savings without reducing your income.  This can also be extremely tax-effective because pension
• payments are generally taxed at a lower rate than your salary.

• Supplementing your income
  If you want to move into part-time work before you retire but don’t want your income to drop you can use your pension to supplement your salary.

Ease yourself – flexibility in retirement

You can choose different transition to retirement strategies depending on what is most important to you.  If you believe you have enough retirement savings you could still benefit from a transition to retirement strategy.  For example, if you wanted to renovate your home before retirement you could keep working full-time and use the extra income from your transition to retirement pension to pay for the work.  That way you get your home improvements done before retirement without taking on any debt.

Are you eligible?

You can take advantage of a transition to retirement strategy if you meet the following conditions:

• You are aged between 56 and 65 years of age
• You are still working
• You transfer some, or all, of your super account to a transition to retirement pension

Important considerations for high income earners

It you earn a high income it’s important to consider the concessional contributions cap before deciding to salary sacrifice as part of a transition to retirement strategy.  If you exceed the concessional contributions cap, which is currently $35,000 for the 2015-2016 financial year, you may be taxed an extra 31.5% tax on any contributions above the cap.

Set it up right from the start

Transition to retirement strategies and flexibility in retirement can provide significant tax savings and benefits, but they can be complicated.  For this reason we strongly recommend that you talk to us in the lead up to retirement so that the strategy you put in place is right for your personal situation.

Get in touch with us today for a no obligation assessment.