The silent deadline that could make or break your retirement

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

I turned 50 at the start of this year, and it’s been the trigger I needed to get serious about my own retirement plan.

As the author of two bestselling books on retirement, I know exactly what to do. But there’s something very different about actually sitting down and doing it yourself, with your partner beside you, setting real goals for your super and other assets, working out how much you can both contribute and how quickly, and running the numbers on what compound investing actually does over a 10- to 15-year runway.

Goals not just to grow your money, but to one day use it. It’s made something that I teach every day feel genuinely more exciting. Because what we’re working towards isn’t just a goal number.

It’s a number that we understand, and that allows us to have choice: the choice to work after 60 because we want to, not because we have to, if life pans out according to plan.

As I’ve stepped through it, something has become obvious to me. The choices available to us right now, in our early to mid-fifties, are remarkable. But a lot of them won’t be there at 65. Some will be weaker. Some will be entirely gone. And that’s the main reason to take your super and savings seriously now, rather than later.

Let’s look at how we can make a big difference:

If you’ve been meaning to get serious about this, let this be your trigger.

Use your catch-up concessional contributions

Most people know that they can contribute up to $30,000 a year, rising to $32,500 on July 1, 2026, into super at the concessional tax rate of 15 per cent.

What far fewer people realise is that if your super balance is under $500,000 at the end of last financial year, you can go back up to five years and use any unused concessional caps you’ve accumulated. These are called catch-up concessional contributions, and they can allow you to drop huge, tax-effective amounts into super in a single year.

$1 million used to be the retirement dream. Now, it........

© The Sydney Morning Herald