Other than tax our next biggest complaint is ‘that we didn’t start planning sooner’. Ask yourself, when are you going to retire, and where is your retirement income going to be paid from? Will this be from your allocated pension, property, shares, managed funds or possibly a Government age pension? It could be a combination of them all.

We’ve all heard of those that have made it big from the sale of a property, but what happens if you don’t have the money to buy that property in the first place? You need to look into different strategies.

Retirement planning is not just about using superannuation but structuring your affairs to help you create your own investment portfolio that will deliver you an income to support a healthy retirement.

Don’t leave it until it’s too late, leaving things to the last minute will just make it harder to reach your goals. By planning early you might only need to modify your current spending minimally, leaving it until later might require huge compromises to your standard of living.

Goal setting is the critical process of deciding what is important to you and what you want to achieve. This is done by separating what’s important from what’s irrelevant, or prioritising your goals to remove distractions. This is one of the most challenging parts of our meeting but can often be the most rewarding. One question we might ask to help explain this is; how do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time! Once your goals are identified and prioritised these can be used as a way of motivating yourself through what would ordinarily seem a list of impossible tasks. This is also a very important tool when used correctly with proven cash flow and budgeting techniques.