The question of how much is needed for a comfortable retirement should be revisited by financial advisers as statistics reveal the estimated cost of retirement will be more expensive than working life.
OnePath national technical manager Graeme Colley said the trend appearing from pension benefit indexes was that the gap was widening between the cost of living in retirement and the cost of living while working.
"What the statistics are showing at the moment is that it will probably be more expensive for us to live in retirement than we thought," Colley said.
"So the best retirement advice you can give someone is to keep working. It's ridiculous.
"I think the statistic is now a child that's born today, on average, is going to live to a hundred."
He said advisers needed to take the new factors into account when creating and reviewing their financial plans.
"They might have various things they can draw on, but, A, are you really taking into account that longevity and, B, the potential that it's going to be more expensive in retirement than while you're working?" he said.
The amount needed for retirement had been underestimated due to the unforeseen future increase in healthcare and aged care costs, the reduction in the real value of the age pension and that expenses in retirement could be greater than when working, he said.
He said the end-of-year holiday period was the time for clients to be financially aware and advisers should be going through a checklist of preparing a budget, reviewing debts and investments, creating a will, planning superannuation contributions, reviewing insurance and revisiting how much was needed for retirement.
"I don't think [clients] are financially aware and they're certainly not looking to the future," he said.
"You've seen the behaviours after the global financial crisis - people are becoming far more conservative.
"They're going into what they regard as conservative, so if you align that with a fairly conservative approach, that means 'I'm worried about the current situation and I'm really not looking forward to how things are going to affect me'."
He said OnePath advisers were also experiencing an inflow of clients who had been made redundant and the possibility of seeing more retrenchments in the future only further highlighted the importance for advisers to go through a checklist with their clients.
