Retirement isn’t just about stopping work – it’s about learning how to make your money work for you. The years leading up to retirement are some of the most important for setting yourself up financially, and knowing how to shift from building wealth to living off it can make all the difference.
With only one in three Australians feeling confident about their financial readiness for retirement, a new book aims to change that. Retire Life Ready (Wiley, 29 October 2025, $34.95) by licensed financial adviser James Wrigley offers a no-nonsense guide to building wealth, reducing debt, and designing a retirement on your own terms. Drawing on over two decades of experience helping Australians plan smarter finances, Wrigley breaks down complex money matters into practical, easy-to-follow steps for achieving confidence and clarity about the future.
The following is an edited extract from Retire Life Ready, which provides practical advice on how to transition from accumulating wealth to living comfortably off it in retirement.
It is highly unlikely that the assets you have accumulated up until your retirement will be the same assets that take you through retirement. Once you retire life ready, the focus shifts from building your asset base to those assets supporting the dream retirement you outlined. The two main phases look like this:
Accumulation
You have a strong focus on growth through things such as topping up your super, buying an investment property, investing in the share market and paying down your debt. Your income from investments isn’t really necessary, as you’re still working. The income you earn from work covers your lifestyle and the income from investments is fully taxable at (up to) marginal tax rates, so you don’t really want much of it if you’re being smart with your tax planning. Growth is what you are chasing.
Living from investments
The income from work stops, so you need to replace that with income from investments. Growth, while still important, takes a back seat to income from your investments and your ability to get your hands on cash for spending. Now, properties with all the debt you were negatively gearing are holding you back from retiring; having your super in the high-growth investment option, holding a big share portfolio, and not having much in cash aren’t such great ideas anymore.
As you head into the final couple of years of your working life, you need to start planning how you will move from the accumulating stage to the living off your assets stage.
When to retire
Some people are fit and healthy and this is a choice they get to make. Others don’t get that choice, perhaps due to poor health or an unplanned redundancy late in their working life.
If you do have the choice, the absolute best thing you can do is use up your leave entitlements before you stop working. If you use your leave, rather than have it paid out, you collect further leave as well as superannuation contributions. Using your leave can mean many thousands of dollars in additional benefits to you versus having all your entitlements paid out.
If you do retire and have your leave paid out in one go, the best thing you can do is retire early in a new financial year. This way, any entitlements you receive aren’t added on top of a full year’s salary and taxed at a potentially higher rate.
Maximising property after retirement
Often, the reason people have accumulated investment properties is to hold the properties and use the rental income to fund their retirement – that is, until they realise how little spending money they actually have from the rent they earn.
While you earn rental income, you also have rental expenses. Those expenses don’t stop when you retire and they eat into your cash flow. So, when do you sell?
Putting aside the ‘right’ time from a market valuation perspective, if we just focus on the tax implications of selling property to better fund retirement, and assuming you’ve made good gains on the investment property, you ideally don’t want to sell it until the next financial year following your retirement. Any gains you make from selling investments are added on top of your ordinary income and taxed at marginal tax rates (less a 50 per cent discount for assets held for more than 12 months), so selling in a financial year following your retirement will likely mean less capital gains tax to pay.
Structure your superannuation for retirement
It’s not ideal to be in high growth on the day you retire, nor is it great to leave it until the day you retire to rebalance your superannuation to something more appropriate for your retirement years.
What matters for your superannuation is when you plan on accessing your benefits, not necessarily when you plan on retiring.
What I like to see is someone starting to transition out of the ‘all growth’ allocation around two to three years out from when they plan on accessing their superannuation.
Using your share portfolio to support retirement
Take a look at the individual investments you are holding. Are those shares dividend payers? Do you have some paying franking credits that can help reduce your tax bill or, even better, be refunded back to you at tax time so you’ve got additional income? Do you have some that will continue to grow in value to help combat inflation over time?
Depending on the structure through which you hold those shares, you’ll also need to manage the tax implications of any shares you choose to sell as you head into retirement.
Your debt has to go
If you haven’t managed to pay off your debts by the time you retire, it has to go.
You absolutely cannot be heading into retirement with outstanding debt on your home. Sell some investments, draw on your superannuation or downsize – do whatever you need to do to get rid of the mortgage.
Debt on investments is only just, and I mean just, acceptable, but it has to go shortly after retirement. It’s hard enough to build the assets you need to generate the income required to cover your lifestyle, let alone try and have extra to continue to pay these debts.
Forget the negative gearing benefits of the debt on your investment property. Those benefits are useless when you are retired and have no income from work to offset those losses against. For many, this is the first time in their adult life they haven’t had a debt to pay – enjoy it.
To learn more about Retire Life Ready and access practical tools to plan your ideal retirement, visit the website. You can also connect with author James Wrigley for ongoing insights and updates – follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for more every day advice on making money matters simple and retiring with confidence.
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