I'm a boomer and, since I've had a good superannuation plan since work day 1, I am obliged to retire at 60, and that's just a little under three years, and IF I survive until and after then I'll not need the age pension and will be comfy enough in a frugal kind of way.
With my federal govt renegging on preelection promises re super AND raising the retirement age to 70 over the next decade I'm SUPERNATURALLY lucky to get out when I can.
Around the time I go the state wioll be in the grip of a MASSIVE teacher shortage - made even worse by those who train to be teachers and leave after three years because they haven't been promoted yet (despite having an almost guaranteed wage increase each year for a decade) or because it's proved too difficult to live with mum 'n'ndad AND travel to the areas that need the staff.
My generation are guilty of much damage to our children:
Paying them to do chores they should do, organizing their lives to the last second, accepting that they needed their own space, TV, stereo etc. In other words giving them all we had wanted for ourselves BUT not actually requiring anything much in return - things like responsibility and silly things like that.
GROSS generalizations I know but reasonably accurate ones when seen across a generation. We did them few favours.
"obliged" ray?
One of my friends has been a teacher all his life (secondary, out in country Qld) and he's talking 60 too, I've told him there's no way I'll be retiring at 60 based on current super balances, and mine are healthier than most, but he seems to be comfortable with the concept. He has no actual money that I'm aware of, so it must be a hell of a super scheme....
And, not to be an Abbott apologist, but, as I say all the time... there is no such thing as "retirement age" - you can retire whenever you like. There are only "age pension eligibility age" and "superannuation preservation age". So for you, those ages would be 55 and 67, respectively. You could retire now if you could afford it, but you ain't getting that pension for a decade... and it wasn't Abbott who made that change from 65... it was Labor.
I'm sure you know all this.
I work in superannuation, and no matter who's steering the ship of state, there's a meltdown of massive proportions a-coming... there'll be a lot of very poor baby boomers who run out of money pretty damn quickly, unfortunately.
I'm not planning on being one of them, so I'll be going a bit longer than 60, I suspect.
All this continual tinkering by governments of both stripes ain't helping matters. There
will be tax on super income over age 60 within the next 5 years. Better plug that one into your calculations. There will be no choice.