An astute way to begin a new year is to take a close look at your personal finances – including your super and non-super investment portfolios and your retirement-saving strategies – and to think about what improvements should be made. Even if your personal finances are in reasonably good shape, there’s inevitably room for improvement. Critically, a guarded but not bearish outlook for portfolio returns underscores why investors should take a disciplined approach and ensure that their expectations for returns are reasonable in this low-interest, more subdued-return environment. (Investors who are overly optimistic may be tempted to take excessive risks in […]

Would you be willing to help your adult children financially if they were experiencing financial difficulties? And would you be willing to help your elderly parents if they were in financial need? Intergenerational financial issues are set to become increasingly common given the ageing of our population. Of course, many instances of providing financial assistance between generations would involve providing a financial helping hand from time to time rather than aiding an elderly parent or adult child in actual financial difficulties. The Australian Institute of Family Studies has just released a research paper, Attitudes towards intergenerational support, that gives an […]