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Opinion
March 28, 2026 — 5:01am
Four weeks on since the war in Iran started, and the financial pressure on retirees is real, and it’s coming from multiple directions at once.
I put the question out to my community this week: how are you really faring? The responses came flooding in, and what struck me wasn’t panic. It was a level of pragmatism, tinged with genuine worry.
The big pain points for retirees and pre-retirees are different to the rest of the population, particularly if they were planning to stop work soon. If you’re still accumulating super, a market downturn is painful but recoverable.
If you’ve stopped working and are drawing down to fund your living expenses, selling assets while prices are depressed permanently impairs your balance in a way you can’t easily undo. Your income doesn’t rise with inflation. You can’t work extra hours to compensate for the money you’re spending at the fuel pump.
And if you had a retirement date circled on the calendar, the maths of whether you can actually afford to stop just got a lot more complicated. This is what financial advisers call sequencing risk, and right now, it’s the thing keeping this group up at night more than any sharemarket headline.
Several people in my community named it directly. Tracey may delay her retirement. Debbie wrote that “this mess is eating up our super”. Veronica’s husband is due to retire in October, and they’re watching nervously.
There’s something heartbreaking about watching people shelve the retirement they imagined.
Debby summed up what many others are feeling. She’s semi-retired, working two days a week, with a commute of over an hour each way. “Those two days of diesel is about $70,” she wrote. “Just keeping my eye on things.”
Liana has postponed her campervan trip entirely over concerns about diesel availability. Fiona cancelled her September cruise around Greece and Turkey, worried about flights through Dubai. “Will stick with caravan close to home,” she said.
Bill and his wife have cut town trips from two or three a week to one, topping up fuel at three-quarters of a tank. These people aren’t catastrophising, they’re just doing the sums and adjusting their plans.
We can all see the rise at the bowser, where petrol is now averaging 238¢ a litre nationally, up from around 169¢ a month ago, with diesel sitting at 282¢. For retirees who rely on a car to visit family, get to part-time work, or simply get around, that’s a 30 to 40 per cent jump in a cost they can’t easily sidestep.
But for many, the fuel story cuts deeper than the weekly trips. The caravan, the campervan, the long drive to visit grandchildren interstate: these aren’t treats. They’re the retirement people spent decades saving for.
The freedom to go where you want, when you want, is often the whole point of having stopped working. Ang just had a caravan built and is now staring down what it costs to tow it behind a V8 Landcruiser.
And Lee-Anne told me her 72-year-old parents called to suggest meeting halfway for brunch the next morning. Not to split the drive. To save the fuel. “I guess you have to save where you possibly can,” she wrote. “I told them there was no need to bring their own toast.”
There’s something heartbreaking about watching people shelve the retirement they imagined, not because of bad planning, but because the world shifted out from underneath them four weeks ago.
In super, the ASX 200 has fallen almost 8 per cent since the beginning of March, so not yet in full correction territory, but it still hurts. Several people said they’re avoiding looking at their balances altogether.
And on inflation, the RBA raised rates again in March to 4.1 per cent, citing the risk that energy-driven price rises could become entrenched. Tanya captured it well: “Seems like every company has already taken the opportunity to put their little bit on: Telstra, insurance, private health. The goal post keeps being pushed back through no fault of our hard work.”
Nobody is going to tell you that everything is fine because right now, it isn’t. But the voices I heard this week were mostly doing the right things, rather instinctively – making small decisions that need to be made to just keep hanging in there for a recovery.
The most important is avoiding sudden moves with your super. Antony told me he’d moved much of his into cash, reasoning that markets are overvalued and the risk-reward doesn’t work for him post-retirement. That’s a legitimate view, and it’s his money.
But for most people, switching to cash during a downturn locks in losses at exactly the wrong moment. Glen put it plainly: “Deep breaths. Come back in six months. The market is still sitting above where we were last year.” He’s right that volatility is not the same as permanent loss, even when it feels that way.
What it is worth doing is checking that your asset allocation still matches your actual situation. If you’re drawing down your super to live on, and you’re heavily exposed to growth assets, that’s a conversation worth having with your financial adviser now. The question isn’t whether markets will recover. It’s whether your structure is right for the conditions you’re actually in.
A cash buffer matters more than ever right now. Retirees who have one to two years of living expenses sitting in cash or a high-interest account are far better placed to ride this out without being forced to sell assets at depressed prices. If that buffer isn’t there, building even a modest one should be a priority before anything else.
On spending, the community has already figured this out. “I’m asking myself with every purchase - is it a need or a want?” wrote Veronica. “We have a few Qld trips booked and family coming from Europe in July, so unsure whether that’ll all be happening now. My husband retires in October and that’s still in the plan.”
Anna retired in January and moved into an off-grid tiny house with chickens, a veggie garden and fruit trees before any of this started. Zen went further, investing in solar, a battery and an EV. “No more petrol or electricity costs,” he said. Not everyone can make those moves, but the instinct to reduce exposure to volatile costs is exactly right.
Veronica’s approach feels like the wisest frame for all of this: take it one month at a time and re-evaluate as needed. That’s how you stay steady when the ground is shifting.
Bec Wilson is author of the bestseller How to Have an Epic Retirement and the newly released Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. She writes a weekly newsletter at epicretirement.net and hosts the Prime Time podcast.
- Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.
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