It’s highly plausible that a long retirement is not in my future. Just like a free college education and affordable housing, it might be following the list of items Baby Boomers enjoyed but the modern generation will never get to see.
This is an extract from The Australian government’s website: “By the time you are 55, you might be thinking about retirement and what to do once you stop working.” If you demand to stop working at age 55, you probably work at an investment bank. By age 55 you’d have clocked up around 30 years of work – slightly less if you took a bit of time off over the years.
We are starting work later and getting married later and signing up to buy a house later. Four out of 10 first home buyers are over the age of 35, according to official statistics. If you acquire a 30-year mortgage at the age of 40, you are likely not to be ready to retire by 60.
Paying off your mortgage as well as contributing to your superannuation is next to impossible. The average superannuation amongst 60-year-old couples is around $300,000. With most of their savings tied up in the family home, it’s hard to access the money to “live it up” in retirement.
This means that retirement is expected to depend on some form of pension. And if you think the Government wants to pay your pension, keep dreaming. Instead, we will be forced to stay in the workforce longer. With plans to move the retirement age from 65 to 67, I can only imagine what they will be thinking when it comes to my time to retire. By looking at the life expectancy of Australians’ in becomes clear to see why they keep trying to move the pension age higher. More people are getting the pension, and for longer. If medicine advances faster than expected, life expectancy by 2055 could be higher than this graph shows. That could mean 25 years of pension payments for the average Aussie, or even more.
100 years ago everyone expected to work until the day they died. And at this rate, it looks like we’re heading back in into History for the retirement ideology.
