Well, I did end up working for most of this year, but I think I’m calling it a day now. Not really an early retirement at 60, but good enough!
This year has not been a good year for self funded retirees. Super has gone backwards, and that’s not taking into account inflation. With inflation, it’s gone down about 11%. This is the first year when average planned expense has gone down (and that’s taking into account I received a good income and spent quite a bit less than planned!). Still,the previous year involved quite a jump in spending power so when combined with this year we are going quite well.
Headline Figures
| 2022 | 2023 | Percent Change | |
| Cash | $359,305 | $329,813 | -8.2% |
| Primary Residence | $2,165,099 | $2,327,500 | 7.5% |
| Superannuation | $2,299,271 | $2,187,632 | -4.86% |
| Investment Property | $443,126 | $731,500 | 65.1% |
| Shares | $221,801 | $224,797 | 1.35% |
| Total Assets | $5,488,603 | $5,801,243 | 5.7% |
The investment property value is taken from the bank evaluation, and looks like they have it in error. If I make it the same as last year, total asset vaues have gone up by about 0.5%. I made contribitions of $90K to my wif’e’s super (and Super overall still went down..) and $10K in shares. Sydney housing prices are now declining, so valuations are likely to decline soon.
Spending and Income in 2022
Spending in 2022 was about $47K, which is a little bit higher than the average of the last few years. We had some house maintenance costs of about $4K (we upgraded our electric switch box and our hotplate blew up), and the inflation of the last couple of years most likely contributed.
Here is our spending breakup:
Per month spending is shown below:
Income in 2022 was quite high at $165K, and savings were about 71% of income.
Updated Spending Patterns
Here are the updated spending patterns:
Average planned expense of $147K represnts a real decline of about 3.5% since last year, the first year in which a decline occured (despite earning about $140K in non-passive income and spending about $93K less than planned!).
My online calculator produces a similar result ($148K):
And if we sell the investment property some time in the future, the spend level goes up quite a bit (about $166K, although this is inflated a bit by the questionnable valuation):
Conclusions
By working this year and spending less than our planned expenditutre levels, we ended up with about $233K of surplus savings (compared to not working and spending according to planned levels). But our planned expenditure went backwards in real terms. This can be attributed to the real loss of about 11% in the value of Super.
Hopefully next year will be better!
Retiring early for Australians 