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James Coyle
James has over 35 years experience in financial services with particular expertise in two of the key components of retirement finance - Superannuation and the Age Pension. He is passionate about providing the guidance and support that can help older Australians enjoy their best possible retirement. He lives in regional Victoria surrounded by dogs and chooks.
To say the system is complex is so correct. Unfortunately no one knows when they will die so how can you plan how much money you will need? Also if one partner dies much earlier than the other they could find themselves on the basic pension. Worrying indeed.
Completely agree with our system being too complex. It’s crazy the amount of rules and regulations there are. Why? I’m a reasonably intelligent person and have been studying the rules and regulations with regard to retirement for quite some years – even when you do get a bit of a handle on it, the rules are changed again. How do individuals who are not particularly literate manage? They would be very vulnerable and open to being ripped off. No wonder people lose interest and don’t want to engage with their superannuation, Centrelink or Financial Advisors.
A very insightful piece. I worked through my age pension entitlements on my own, but with the help of the retirement essentials articles (sorry but there were a few complexities). I nominated my super pension income and to my surprise I finally received advice of our fortnightly age pension amounts which was in excess of what I had calculated. It took 6 months of research and running scenarios to get to this point. One of the key issues was to give Centrelink everything up front (including family trust information and financials – another huge form) . My application went to complex assessment team and it took a bit longer but was accepted without requiring other information. The Pension Concession Card has already shown its worth. This article makes me reflect that I might be able to scale back on the super pension amount . Thanks to retirement essentials for helping me to complete the journey. I may still avail myself of the financial advice service which seems a very reasonable cost.
after dealing with centre link after turning 65 in feb i did not get my first payment till sept because of red tape or a form i did not fill out that failed to give me iam now 71 and finally got my full pension less two dollars