‘This mess is eating our super’: Why retirees are starting to get nervous

March 28, 2026 — 2:01am

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Four weeks on since the war in Iran started, and the financial pressure on retirees is real, and it’s coming from multiple directions at once.

I put the question out to my community this week: how are you really faring? The responses came flooding in, and what struck me wasn’t panic. It was a level of pragmatism, tinged with genuine worry.

The big pain points for retirees and pre-retirees are different to the rest of the population, particularly if they were planning to stop work soon. If you’re still accumulating super, a market downturn is painful but recoverable.

If you’ve stopped working and are drawing down to fund your living expenses, selling assets while prices are depressed permanently impairs your balance in a way you can’t easily undo. Your income doesn’t rise with inflation. You can’t work extra hours to compensate for the money you’re spending at the fuel pump.

And if you had a retirement date circled on the calendar, the maths of whether you can actually afford to stop just got a lot more complicated. This is what financial advisers call sequencing risk, and right now, it’s the thing keeping this group up at night more than any sharemarket headline.

Several people in my community named it directly. Tracey may delay her retirement. Debbie wrote that “this mess is eating up our super”. Veronica’s husband is due to retire in October, and they’re watching nervously.

There’s something heartbreaking about watching people shelve the retirement they imagined.

Debby summed up what many others are feeling. She’s semi-retired, working two days a week, with........

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