Here’s a fun game to play in your last month of work. Log into your super fund and try to find the form to start your retirement income. Now guess what it’s called.

Is it a pension account? A retirement income stream? A “choice income” option? Flexi pension? Super income stream? Or something else that sounds suspiciously like a branding brainstorm that got out of hand?

Retirement is confusing – and that’s before you have to wade through piles of super fund jargon.Credit: Simon Letch

If you’re confused, congratulations. You’re really normal.

Super funds have spent the past two decades reminding us to save for retirement, making it easy and almost doing the job for us. But when we get to the business end of retirement, where we’re finally ready to spend our super, there’s suddenly a lot to figure out.

It’s at this point that they serve up a jargon soup which makes little sense to anyone outside the finance department, made more confusing because a lot of the terms cross over with language that is used to describe government payments.

Some funds call your retirement account a pension, but you associate the word pension with social security. Some call it an income stream, which makes more sense – if you’ve spoken to an adviser. If not, it’s just a new concept altogether.

What we need is a superannuation dictionary for retirement.

Others go with “income”, just to be vague. A few try to be cute and use all three, switching between “pension” and “income” and even adding in the wider term “account-based pension” just as you’ve finally worked out what the first one meant.

The only thing they seem to agree on is that none of them should use the same words as each other, or, helpfully, as the government.

Just to be clear: your account-based pension is not the same as the age pension, which is not the same as the transition-to-retirement income stream, or your retirement income stream, and none of those are what’s actually written on the form you’re........

© The Sydney Morning Herald