Why retirement planning can't wait until you're close to retiring

Nobody decides not to plan for retirement. That is worth saying plainly, because the language around this topic tends to imply carelessness, and carelessness is almost never what is going on. What actually happens is far more ordinary: retirement stays permanently one stage away.

After the kids are through school. After the mortgage is under control. After the next promotion, when there will be more room to think about it properly. Each of those is a reasonable thing to say at the time. Said enough times in a row, they add up to a plan that was never made — and then one day the thing that was always coming later is here.

Most people have a feeling, not a number

Ask someone in their forties how they are placed for retirement and the answer is usually a version of “there should be a reasonable amount of super by then”. That is not a plan. It is a feeling, and a feeling has one fatal property: it cannot be checked. You cannot tell whether it is optimistic by twenty per cent or by two hundred. You cannot act on it, because it does not point anywhere. And you cannot correct it, because you will not discover it was wrong until it stops being a projection and starts being your income.

What “enough” actually costs

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia publishes what is probably the most-used benchmark in the country. On its March 2026 figures, a comfortable retirement costs a couple about $78,566 a year, and a single person about $55,923. To fund that from 67, ASFA estimates a couple needs roughly $730,000 in super, and a single person about $630,000.

The other row in that table is the one worth staring at. A modest retirement — the tier below — costs a couple $52,473 a year and a single person $36,434. “Modest” is a gentle word doing a great deal of work there. It does not describe a life of tasteful restraint. It describes a budget with very little slack in it, for two people, for the rest of their lives.

The assumption hiding inside the benchmark

Every one of those figures rests on a condition that is easy to skim past: they assume you own your home outright. ASFA publishes a separate set of numbers for people still renting, and the difference is stark — a modest budget for a renting couple runs to $69,002 rather than $52,473.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for a growing number of households. Among homeowners aged 55 to 64, fewer than one in five still carried a mortgage in 1996; by 2019 it was 54%. A great many people are measuring themselves against a target calculated for a situation they will not be in — and the error runs the wrong way. Housing is still a cost, so the real requirement is higher, not lower.

It has to last longer than people picture

There is a mental image of retirement as a wind-down — a short, quiet final chapter. The arithmetic says otherwise. ASFA publishes its budgets for ages 65 to 84, and then again for people aged 85 and over, because that second stretch is now a normal part of a life rather than an outlier.

So this is not funding a few years at the end. It is funding what amounts to a second adult lifetime — two decades or more of housing, food, health, transport and the occasional thing that makes life worth living — with no wage arriving to top it up. Money that lasted comfortably for ten years does not necessarily last twenty.

Why time is the part you cannot buy back

Almost every input into a retirement position can be changed later. You can earn more. You can spend less. You can restructure, consolidate, reconsider. There is exactly one input that cannot be topped up at any price, and it is the one that does most of the work: the number of years the money has to grow.

A dollar put aside at 35 and a dollar put aside at 60 are not the same dollar, and the gap is not marginal. Which is why the timing of the conversation matters more than its content. At 45 the levers are real and most of them are cheap. At 58 the same levers still exist, but cost several times as much to pull, because the compounding that used to do the lifting has to be replaced with cash out of your own pocket. The options do not disappear. They get expensive, and then they get unaffordable.

The point isn't the plan. It's the gap.

People resist this conversation because they expect to be told what to do, and they are not sure they want to be told. But the first and by far the most valuable thing that comes out of working the numbers is not a strategy. It is simply the size of the gap — the distance between where the current trajectory lands and where you would need it to.

That single figure changes the conversation, in both directions. Plenty of people find they are closer than they feared and stop carrying a worry they did not need. Others find a real gap — while there is still time for it to be an ordinary problem rather than a permanent one. Either outcome is worth more than the feeling it replaces.

Retirement is the one financial deadline that never moves and never sends a reminder, and the only major commitment most people face where a late start cannot be recovered by working harder at the end. That is the whole argument for looking early: not because the news is bad, but because early is when it is still news you can do something about.

This article is general information only, current as at August 2026, and doesn't take your personal circumstances into account. The ASFA Retirement Standard figures are restated quarterly and rest on their own stated assumptions, including home ownership, drawing down capital and receiving a part Age Pension — your own position may differ materially. Please confirm the current detail and seek personal advice before acting.