Active Super

Taking stock

A quick review can show if you’re on track to have sufficient super to support a quality retirement lifestyle.

You can access a retirement income calculator that lets you estimate your potential future retirement income. Back this up by heading to the future lifestyle calculator to see if your super will fund your ideal lifestyle.

Building your super

As a 50-something, retirement may be just around the corner. Or you may want to keep working for as long as possible. Remember though, life doesn’t always go according to plan, and a change in circumstances could see you retiring earlier than expected. 

This highlights the need to grow your super today. 

A simple way to add to your super is through salary sacrifice, where part of your before-tax wage is paid to your super rather than receiving the money as cash in hand.

Or, you might prefer to make a personal super contribution, which you may be able to claim on tax. 

Tax deductible personal contributions count towards your before-tax (concessional) contribution limits (along with any salary sacrifice or other employer contributions made for you).  You can’t claim a tax deduction for superannuation contributions paid by your employer directly to your super fund, only for personal super contributions that you make to your super fund. So (based on the concessional contribution limit for the 2024/25 financial year), if your boss contributes $20,000 to your super, your personal contributions, on which you may be able to claim a tax deduction is limited to $10,000 in a financial year.

If you don’t make the full $30,000 contributions in the 2024/25 financial year, you can carry forward unused contributions for up to five years as long as your super savings (across all super funds you participate in) are below $500,000¹ at 30 June of the previous year.

Budget to find extra contributions

By the time we are in our 50s, many of life’s major expenses may be behind us, such as a mortgage or raising a young family. Using a budget helps you make the most of your money – and find spare cash for extra super contributions.