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.
This is a seriously powerful strategy in your fifties, when you’re often at peak earnings, your tax bill is at its highest, and the pressure of funding the kids’ education has finally come off.
But the window is finite. Wait too long and you either exceed the $500,000 threshold, or you run out of years to use it.
At 50, putting after-tax money into super isn’t just topping up your balance. It’s a deliberate strategy to get your money into the lowest tax environment available to you, as early as you can, so that compounding can do its best work while you sleep.
Inside super, investment earnings are taxed at just 15 per cent while you’re accumulating. For most people in their peak earning years, that’s a fraction of what they’re paying on investments held outside super. And once you retire, that tax rate drops to zero on balances up to the transfer balance cap of $2.1 million from July 1.
Take Sarah. She’s 50, and her mother recently died, leaving her an inheritance of $360,000. On the advice of her financial planner, she uses the bring-forward rule to contribute the entire amount into super as a non-concessional contribution in one go.
No tax on the way in because she’s already paid it. That $360,000 then sits inside super, growing at an average return of about 7 per cent a year for 15 years until she retires at 65. By then, it has grown to just under $993,000. She contributed $360,000 and compounding did the rest.
Her friend Karen receives a similar inheritance at 63 and makes the same move. But Karen has only seven years before she retires at 70. That same $360,000, at the same 7 per cent return, grows to about $578,000.
Still a great outcome. But the difference between what Sarah ends up with and what Karen ends up with is more than $415,000, and neither of them did anything differently. It just came down to when they acted and time spent in the market, compounding.
Take time to reshape your structure
This is the one that surprised me most when I sat down to work through our own plan. At 50, you still have time to re-engineer where your money sits and how it will compound from here.
You can gradually shift assets from outside superannuation into the tax-advantaged environment inside it. You can unwind old managed funds that have been sitting there doing not much, and redeploy those funds into higher performing and lower-fee investments.
You can position your super more aggressively towards growth, knowing you have a genuine 10- to 15-year runway before you need to draw on it if your risk profile allows.
By 65, you’re largely managing what you’ve already built, or grappling with how to turn what you’ve ignored into enough by combining it with the age pension. The levers to reshape the structure are mostly gone.
Understand the age pension
A big question worth asking yourself honestly at 50 is: are you ever likely to be on the cusp of age pension eligibility?
If you think you might land in that middle ground, which is where a surprisingly large number of Australians end up, then understanding how the system works now and making sensible decisions throughout your fifties and sixties so you’re not accidentally working against yourself later, is absolutely worth the attention.
Contemplate if and when you’ll downsize
If you’re 55 or over and sell a home you’ve owned for at least 10 years, you can contribute up to $300,000 a person, or $600,000 a couple, directly into super under the downsizer contribution.
It doesn’t count towards your usual contribution caps, and there’s no tax on the way in. At 50, you’re not there yet, but you’re close enough to be thinking about it, deliberately.
That might mean thinking carefully about when you might want to sell, how you time it to get money into super, and how those proceeds fit into your broader strategy.
At 65, downsizing is often triggered by necessity, health, cashflow or a home that’s become too much to manage. At 55, or soon afterwards, it can be a deliberate and powerful wealth-building move, to downshift and add funds to super earlier, where again, they can compound at a low tax rate.
Think about phasing retirement
This is huge in real life, and something I’m planning for myself. At 50, you can start to picture your transition towards retirement as something gradual and intentional, rather than a sudden stop.
Maybe that looks like moving from full-time work into consulting, then a portfolio career, then part-time, then casual. Each step down reduces your reliance on your super while still giving it time to grow.
You can also use a transition to retirement income stream, which lets you draw a modest income from your super while you’re still working, smoothing your income as you reduce your hours without raiding your savings or compromising your lifestyle.
At 65, for many people, the decision becomes binary. Work, or stop. And that’s a much harder and less pleasant way to make one of the biggest transitions of your life.
Working through our own plan progressively this year has given me more courage to strive, and reminded me that the best time to act is when you still have choices. In your early to mid-50s, you have more options than most people realise, and more than you’ll have at 65.
But some of those choices will disappear as the years pass, and no one will send you a warning – they’ll just quietly vanish one day. So if you’ve been meaning to get serious about this, let this be your trigger.
Bec Wilson is author of the bestseller How to Have an Epic Retirement and the newly released Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. She writes a weekly newsletter at epicretirement.net and hosts the Prime Time podcast.
- Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.
Expert tips on how to save, invest and make the most of your money delivered to your inbox every Sunday. Sign up for our Real Money newsletter.
Bec Wilson is the author of How To Have An Epic Retirement and writes a weekly newsletter for pre- and post-retirees at epicretirement.net.
