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Sue Strudwick's avatar

I did the Epic Retirement course earlier this year and thought I understood what to do with my Super when I retire.

So I tried contacting AusSuper to move to the 'retirement phase' and firstly they ignored me. When I waited more than 50 minutes on the phone (3rd attempt to contact them) they completely confused me with different names I was not familiar with. I asked to speak to a second person because the first person really didn't know what they were saying and couldn't explain it to me in any other way.

The second person gave additional advice (conflicting with the first person I spoke to) and used different terminology from the first person. So after over 2 hours I'm more confused than ever!

I filled in the survey and said I still needed help and no-one has bothered to contact me!!

Should I just remove my balance and go to a different Super organisation? One that can actually help me.

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Lisa Reed's avatar

Oops! We must live in different bubbles. I don't know anyone who uses chatgpt.

And I don't know how to use it. Is it a website? Is it an app? Of course, I have heard of it.

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Stephen Bury's avatar

Anyone under age 60 but certainly 55 who is not going to be clearly self-funded needs to be very careful with projections that assume age pension tests and eligibility remain as is. I wouldn’t be surprised if the eligibility age pushes out to 70 or assets test tightened by the time a 54 year old gets there (age 67.) can’t see how the country will be able to afford it by then….

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Robin Zakharov's avatar

Thanks for today’s article. I’ve just gone through the process of opening the pension account with my super fund and it was slow & frustrating - and I had a financial advisor helping me. Communication from the fund through this process was terrible & I have given them some sharp feedback! Now I can’t access details of my just closed accumulation account. Agree with everything you wrote!

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Richard Leckey's avatar

Hi Bec, great advice to encourage people to use calculators to model retirement outcomes under different scenarios. In your plan your retirement test, you used the Government Money Smart Calculator, which has a standard planning age of 92. If you are a member of a couple planning retirement it is amazing to find that using 92 has only a 35% chance of being long enough!! I would encourage people to used the Lifespan calculator on the EPIC website https://www.epicretirement.com.au/resources-and-tools to see what level of confidence they can feel in different planning periods.

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Philip Redfern's avatar

Great read. Have used chatGPT for a few other things and as you said good to experiment with. I have used 2 other AI platforms and they all come up different for the same topic

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