A common personal finance trap is to concentrate on saving and investing to finance our eventual retirement without thinking enough in advance about how to invest and spend that money in retirement. Given that we have so much going on in our lives long before retirement –such as our careers, dependent children, home mortgages and trying to save – this focus on accumulation is understandable. But it’s only part of the equation. It makes sense to begin developing smart retiree spending and investing strategies long before retiring. This should help you think about what are your personal and investment goals […]

There are plenty of benefits from being self-employed including having a typically high degree of independence. And no doubt many employees would gladly join their ranks – if they could run a profitable and personally-satisfying business. Yet being self-employed is obviously not all beer and skittles, as the cliché goes. From a financial perspective, one of the common downsides is that most of the self-employed have little or no super, according to research over several years by the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA). This means that millions of the self-employed, working on a full or part-time basis, are […]