Why getting simple super advice has become an expensive nightmare

August 15, 2026 — 5:01am

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If you walk into a financial adviser’s office at the age of 58, approaching retirement with about $700,000 in superannuation, a mortgage, a few hundred thousand dollars invested outside, what should happen next?

And if you walked into a super fund advice appointment, with the same amount of money, and the same mixed picture, what can they do to help you? What can they advise you on, and more importantly, what can’t they?

Most Australians would expect broadly the same thing from both: help understanding whether they have enough, what sort of retirement they can afford, what to do about the remaining mortgage and whether their super and investments are in the right place, and taking the right amount of risk, and, ultimately, a clear plan for what steps they should take next.

But what happens next can really surprise people because, despite starting with the same problem, the two advice models can’t offer the same help.

A comprehensive financial adviser is legally allowed to look across your broader financial life, including your super, investments, mortgage, tax position and retirement goals. But increasingly, many advice businesses are also built around providing ongoing investment management.

Part of the reason is that the regulatory burden and the cost of providing comprehensive advice has made smaller, one-off pieces of advice difficult to provide profitably. So what begins as a request for retirement advice can become the start of a much longer commercial relationship, with the client’s super and investments moved onto a platform and managed on an ongoing basis by the advice business or an investment manager connected to it.

[Everyday consumers] just want to understand their choices and get trustworthy advice about their retirement.

A super fund comes at the same retirement problem from the opposite direction. It already has your money and increasingly, it wants to keep looking after it throughout your retirement.

Funds are building retirement products, guidance and advice services to help members make that transition to retirement with them. This could make retirement advice vastly more accessible and affordable for millions of Australians.

But the advice a fund can offer its members has some significant boundaries. It is largely limited to advising on the money invested within the fund rather than the bigger picture of your financial life or the alternatives available to you.

That can significantly limit how far they can go in considering things like the age pension, or even your broader retirement picture, to........

© Brisbane Times