The super shake-up that could change how you spend in retirement |
The super shake-up that could change how you spend in retirement
May 23, 2026 — 5:01am
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Many people approaching retirement feel a deep, gut-level fear about how to spend. They have spent the past decade, or maybe two, saving hard for what could be a 30-year retirement, and most have no real idea how their money will work once they get there.
Financial advice, the only industry legally able to help with that fear, has spent years rewriting its business models around managing investments for an ongoing annual fee, making it expensive and largely the domain of the wealthy.
Super funds have been left to solve the problem for everyone else, and they have been loudly encouraged by the government to step up with a combination of digital advice and lifetime income products.
This week, two announcements signal that everyday people should start getting excited about doing retirement income differently.
Colonial First State has announced one of the biggest expansions of retirement solutions I have seen, bringing Challenger, BlackRock and Generation Life into a single integrated platform for advisers and their own unadvised members.
Its new lifetime income solutions will be offered via its super fund or its adviser platform, accessed through complex adviser-led advice or through low-cost intra-fund and retirement advice, largely digital but with real advisers supporting the journey.
Imagine if your super fund paid you a regular, guaranteed income for the rest of your life after you stopped working.
On Monday, AMP will become the first major super fund to launch a fully branded, actively promoted direct-to-member lifetime retirement income product at real scale. What makes its model clever is that it works in two stages.
AMP Super Lifetime can be switched on years before retirement inside an existing AMP Super account at no extra cost, using government deeming rules to begin building a lower concessional balance for Centrelink purposes from the day you activate it. The AMP Lifetime Retirement Income launching on Monday then converts that into an income for life.
Most lifetime income products ask you to decide at retirement. AMP’s model lets you start the clock years earlier, working in the........