General advice warning General information and illustrations only — not personal financial advice. Read the important information
Companion tools — 7 Basic Retirement Strategies
Retire Ready
Five calculators from the book, for the years before you stop working. Everything here is in today's dollars, and every rate is yours to set — so nothing on this page goes stale between now and the day you land.
Where you're landing
Design the life first, then price it. Put in what a year of your retirement actually costs, split into the spending you can't switch off and the spending that makes it worth doing.
Start here — set these once, and the rest of the page follows
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Change when the phases turn over
Most people slow down in two steps rather than one. These are the ages that tend to mark them — move them if you know your own health and family history says otherwise.
Before the numbers — five questions
Everything below prices a life you have to be able to picture. The best guide most of us have is the longest holiday we've taken — so start there, and answer honestly rather than hopefully.
Answer the five to see which parts of your picture are solid and which are worth testing before you set a date.
No idea where to start? Begin from a published benchmark
ASFA publishes budgets for a modest and a comfortable retirement, for singles and for couples, and updates them every quarter. Look up the figure that fits your household, type it in here, and this will split it into the two numbers below in the rough shape that lifestyle tends to take. Then change them until they describe your life rather than the average one.
Nothing here is stored — the current ASFA figures live on their site, not in this page.
What the Retirement Standard covers · Look up the current figures at ASFA
Itemise it line by line, and shape the later years
Spending you can’t switch off
Spending that makes it worth doing
The later years
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What each phase costs
In today's dollars, before any income you'll receive. It's a big number because it's a long life — that's the point of the exercise, not a reason to keep working.
Enter each line however you actually think about it — the groceries per week, the insurance per month, the holiday per year. Everything converts to a yearly figure behind the scenes, and the totals above are always annual.
Mind the gap
What you need at the end of the runway, against what the runway will actually produce — after contributions tax, after tax on earnings inside super, and in today's dollars. If there's a gap, it is far better to meet it now than to find it on the day.
Work the target out for me, and adjust the assumptions
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Set your target and your runway to see the gap.
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Three ways to close it — pick one, or share the load
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The cost of circling
One more year always looks free. It isn't. This shows both sides of the trade at once — what the extra years add to the balance, and what they take from the years you can still use properly.
The funding gap below comes from Strategy 1 and Strategy 3 — what you spend, less the income that turns up without you.
Enter your numbers to see the trade.
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The trade, side by side
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Your two engines
One engine that's steady, one that grows. The steady one has only two sources — the Age Pension and annuities. The test isn't how big the pile is — it's whether the steady engine alone can carry the spending you can't switch off.
Add your guaranteed income to see whether both engines are running.
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Who carries what
Only two things belong in the guaranteed engine: the Age Pension, and annuity-style income you have contracted for life. Rent, dividends and term deposits feel steady, but a tenant leaves, a dividend is cut and a rate rolls over — they belong in the growth engine, where they can be counted honestly.
The point of the guaranteed engine isn't return. It's that a bad year on the market can't reach it. Whatever it doesn't cover, the growth engine has to — and the growth engine is the one exposed to Strategy 4.
The danger zone
Two versions of you, retiring on exactly the same day with exactly the same money, spending exactly the same amount. Both live through the very same run of good and bad markets. The only difference is when the bad years turn up.
If the bad years come first
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If the same bad years come later
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Why this happens, in one paragraph
While you were working, a market fall was a paper loss. You did not sell anything, you kept adding, and the recovery came back to you in full.
The day you stop, that reverses. Now you have to sell something every year to live on, downturn or not. Selling into a fall means selling more units for the same grocery money — and those units are gone before the recovery arrives. The same crash, met at 66 instead of 46, does permanent damage.
This is why the years either side of your last day are different from every year that came before them.
Change the market assumptions
Fill in Strategy 1 and Strategy 3 first — what gets spent here is the gap between them.
What actually protects you — facing that same bad start
Enter your guaranteed income in Strategy 3 to see this.
You cannot control when a downturn arrives. You can control how much of your grocery money depends on selling shares in the year it does. That is the whole argument for the guaranteed engine.
Keep your numbers
Nothing here is saved when you close the page, so take a copy before you go. Everything you entered and everything it worked out is written up below in plain words — your runway, your two engines, your gap, and where the pressure points are.
Printing gives you a clean two-page summary — the calculators, the site header and the page furniture are all left out. If your browser adds the date and web address along the top and bottom, untick Headers and footers under More settings in the print dialog.
Read the summary
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Where to check the current numbers
No rate or threshold is stored on this page — every figure you type in is yours to verify.
The four places to check
- Age Pension — rates, eligibility, the income and assets tests, deeming · Services Australia
- Super caps and tax — contribution caps, preservation age, transfer balance cap, minimum drawdown · ATO
- Independent calculators and the adviser register · MoneySmart · Advisers register
- Benchmark retirement budgets — the modest and comfortable standards · ASFA
External links are provided for convenience; those sites are governed by their own terms.
Important information
This page gives general information only and is not personal financial advice. It does not consider your objectives, situation or needs. Every output is an illustration of the assumptions you entered — not a projection, an entitlement, or a guarantee. No government rate or threshold is stored here; verify each one before you rely on it. Prepared by Victor Idoko, CFV Advisory, Corporate Authorised Representative (001286043) of Spark Advisors Australia Pty Ltd, AFSL 380 552. Speak to a licensed financial adviser before acting.
Read the full terms — limitations, assumptions, liability, privacy and licensing
General advice warning
The information on this page is general information only. It has been prepared without taking into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. It is not personal financial product advice, and it is not a recommendation to acquire, dispose of, hold or vary any financial product, to make or stop contributions, to start or stop a pension, to claim or not claim a government benefit, or to retire on any particular date. Before acting on any of it, you should consider whether it is appropriate for you having regard to your own circumstances, read any relevant product disclosure statement or target market determination, and obtain personal advice from a licensed financial adviser and, where relevant, a registered tax agent.
These are illustrations, not projections
Every output on this page is an arithmetic illustration of the assumptions you typed in. Nothing here is a forecast, projection, estimate of your actual entitlements, or guarantee of any outcome. Small changes to the inputs produce large changes to the outputs, particularly over long periods. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. Investment returns are not guaranteed and you can lose money. The value of your retirement savings will rise and fall, and the order in which those rises and falls occur — the very thing the danger zone calculator illustrates — cannot be known in advance.
What these calculators deliberately do not do
- They do not apply the Centrelink income test, assets test, deeming rules or the Work Bonus. The Age Pension figure used is whatever you enter; your actual entitlement is determined by Services Australia and may be nil.
- They do not enforce contribution caps, preservation age, conditions of release, the transfer balance cap, minimum pension drawdown rates, Division 293 tax or any other legislated limit. Exceeding a cap can create additional tax.
- They do not model personal income tax, capital gains tax, tax on withdrawals, insurance premiums deducted from super, adviser fees, administration fees or investment fees beyond any allowance you build into the return you enter.
- They do not distinguish between singles and couples, between individual and joint assets, or between super and non-super money, and they do not model the death of a partner, divorce, or the loss of one income.
- They do not model aged care costs, home care packages, health events, insurance needs, estate planning, debt, the family home, downsizing, or an inheritance received or given.
- They assume spending, contributions and income continue in a smooth and unbroken line, which is not how any real retirement behaves.
- The danger zone calculator uses a single fixed, illustrative sequence of returns chosen to demonstrate a principle. It is not a simulation of market behaviour and should not be read as a probability of any outcome.
Rates, thresholds and currency of information
No government rate, cap or threshold is stored in this page. Superannuation, taxation and social security law changes frequently, and thresholds are indexed. You are responsible for verifying every rate you enter against the current published figures from Services Australia, the ATO or MoneySmart at the time you use this page. Information that was accurate when this page was published may no longer be accurate when you read it.
No reliance and no liability
While care has been taken in preparing these calculators, no warranty is given as to their accuracy, completeness or suitability for any purpose, and errors are possible. To the maximum extent permitted by law, no liability is accepted for any loss or damage — direct, indirect or consequential — arising from any use of, or reliance on, this page or anything generated by it, including decisions about when to retire, how much to contribute, how much to spend, or how to invest.
Your privacy
The calculators themselves run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into them is transmitted or stored, and closing or refreshing the page clears it.
There is no form on this page and nothing is sent anywhere. The copy and print buttons work entirely on your own device.
Who is responsible for this page
Prepared by Victor Idoko, CFV Advisory. CFV Advisory is a Corporate Authorised Representative (001286043) of Spark Advisors Australia Pty Ltd ABN 34 122 486 935, AFSL 380 552. Victor Idoko is an Authorised Representative (001238690) of Spark Advisors Australia Pty Ltd. You can confirm these details on the ASIC Financial Advisers Register, and you should read the Financial Services Guide before engaging any advice service.
External links and copyright
Build v13 · 2026-08-18 · retire-ready
Links to third-party sites are provided for convenience only and do not constitute an endorsement; those sites are governed by their own terms. This page is a companion to 7 Basic Retirement Strategies: What to Do in the Years Before You Stop Working. Its content may not be reproduced without permission.