Forget the $1 million myth. You need a new magic retirement number

July 19, 2026 — 3:00am

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For all the ways in which every person and their financial goals are unique, often many commonalities are shared. Plenty of people, for example, want to be able to afford a nice holiday once a year.

Some of us aspire to never having a credit card. Most of us strive to be comfortable enough that we don’t feel immediately panicked when an unexpected bill comes in or when we’re at the supermarket checkout.

And all of us, I’m fairly confident in guessing, want to know that, at the end of our working lives, we can expect a comfortable retirement.

For a long time, conventional wisdom said that the magic superannuation balance every person needs to hit by the time they’re 65 is $1 million. It’s not as if this number is some arbitrary figure plucked out of thin air, but that also doesn’t mean this one size guide should fit all.

There’s also a sense among many of us that, thanks to our very effective mandatory superannuation system, our retirement plans are a set and forget thing. With 12 per cent of our pay being put away and our balances ticking over regularly, do we really need to try to carve out more time from our already time poor schedules to do more hypothetical planning?

The short answer is that yes, we absolutely do.

Just because a generation has seen improvement in the length of life, doesn’t mean there will be improvement in the quality of those years.Demographer Mark McCrindle

Today, Australia now ranks among the top OECD nations for life expectancy. And so, with each generation on track to live longer than the ones that came before us, as well as more people entering retirement still with mortgages, and more young........

© WA Today