Nobel laureate economist Robert Merton says David Murray’s Financial System Inquiry must fundamentally shift how Australia thinks about superannuation. He says the desire to maximise lump-sum balances at retirement is excessively risky; the focus should be on ensuring retirement income is enough to meet a desired standing of living. Source: AFR – 6 Nov 2014 …
Category Archive: Retirement Income
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Aug 28
What is the Risk Free asset?
This question is probably only important when establishing a base-line return expectation before we accept various type of investment risk. I guess we all know that technically there is no such thing as a Risk Free Asset but generally speaking it is widely believed that Cash is the risk free asset. Whilst I’m prepared to …
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May 31
Australian Government Bond Yield Curve…plus a bit on lifetime annuities
Source: RBA, Delta Research & Advisory Not too many posts in recent times and its been a while since I looked at the yield curve and I have to admit that after scanning the various newspapers I was expecting to see some significant moves. As the above chart shows, the curve has barely moved in …
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Mar 06
The most powerful financial planning tool
The process of financial planning is like any planning process… you find out where the client is positioned today, work with the client to establish goals whilst understanding the constraints to reaching those goals, and then design, present and implement a strategy to reach those goals…which is then reviewed on a regular basis..therefore go back …
Nov 17
Life Expectancy Myths and Facts…and should we increase the pension age
This week I read a couple of articles on US Life Expectancy trends that got me curious about the situation in Australia…the articles were written by Paul Krugman and Aaron Carroll and basically implied that life expectancies aren’t increasing as much as everyone thinks and if you think that the age pension age should be …
May 20
Being a millionaire may not be enough for a comfortable retirement
Source: Delta Research & Advisory Pty Ltd The above chart shows the probability of running out of funds in retirement for someone who retires with $1,000,000 in today’s dollar and draws $55,080 each year (ASFA Retirement Standard for a comfortable retirement for a couple), growing at 3% inflation. It is assumed the funds are invested …
Apr 16
Retirement Income Portfolios – poorly understood
One of the debates in the financial services media has been around the investment strategy of superannuation funds and whether they are holding too many equities. In the camp of too many equities is former Head of Treasury, Ken Henry, nd former Chairman of the Future Fund, David Murray; and opposing views have typically been …
Mar 27
Does our Super have too much in equities?
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been asked to comment on the asset allocations of default super funds. There’s certainly been a very interesting debate through the print media which was probably started by David Murray, Chairman of the Future Fund, last year when he stated that Austrlaian Super Funds were too heavily invested …
Jul 25
A Few Retirement Income Articles
I haven’t written too much on retirement income recently, well just a little bit. Anyway, before I write a whole lot more (my day job is currently focused on this area) I thought I’d post a couple of my older retirement income articles for those that may be interested…also can’t help but notice that Jeremy …