It might see you contemplating whether you can change your work rhythm, and how you want to spend your time as your life opens up again. But that wouldn’t be as easy to do if you didn’t have your financial foundations in place.

It might also mean looking beyond super altogether. Midlife is the ideal time to build up other income-producing investments, take advantage of tax-effective ways to invest, and to review your insurances to see if you really need to be paying such high life insurance policies now the kids are more self-sufficient, or if you could redirect those funds into savings.

These are the real levers that are often overlooked until the latter stages of pre-retirement that shape how resilient and relaxed your 50s, 60s, and later, your retirement years will be.

Retirement isn’t the goal. A good life is. And it starts long before the finish line.

In my view, it’s no longer about retiring early. It needs to be about having choice as you move through this stage of life. It’s about shaping what your 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s might look like – and using the early years of that process to lay the groundwork.

That’s what I call the pre-retirement or midlife set-up phase. Then, I want people in their 40s, 50s and 60s to start looking for joy and meaning in the now – not just cramming all their hopes and dreams into a retirement plan and telling themselves they have to stick it out in a job they no longer enjoy for the next 10 years.

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We shouldn’t be waiting for retirement to get to the good bits. We’ve had more than 30 years of superannuation to help build up a decent savings base. This is the time to reset, realign, and make the system work for you – not the other way around.

Too many people still treat super as a set-and-forget product, and retirement as the next destination for their plan. They assume they can’t influence their super much, or that it’s all too complicated. And they often carry around this vague sense that they’ll never have “enough”, without ever learning what enough actually means.

As a result, they miss the chance to build a realistic strategy for retirement early then to plan for those years before retirement, when the kids are independent, the mortgage is smaller, and life might actually be more affordable – and more fun.

That’s the time when many people could enjoy more lifestyle freedom, shift to part-time work, or finally start living with a bit more ease. But only if they plan for it.

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The truth is, getting your act together earlier – looking at your super, your investments, and how you want to live, work and play in the years ahead and building a picture – can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to your future position. Not through magic, but through smart, informed decisions made while you still have time to act.

Because the real secret is this: retirement isn’t the goal. A good life is. And it starts long before the finish line.

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 financial decisions.

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