Why Christmas lunch is the perfect time to start retirement planning
Idea
The countdown has begun. Christmas is upon us, and among the prawns, crickets and long lunches, there’s one thing we rarely have room for: time.
It’s time to slow down and talk about life in a way most of us can’t manage to do throughout the year. And if you’re in your 50s or 60s, this is also one of the best opportunities to talk about retirement. Not the official version with paperwork and calculators, but the real version that starts with simple, honest conversations about how you want to live.
Before you are led to believe that retirement planning starts with investments or spreadsheets, it’s helpful to be clear that it doesn’t start with numbers. It starts with conversations, often leading to a negotiation about life, then money.
Christmas is one of the few times when couples and families are comfortable enough to lift their eyes from the day to day and talk honestly about what the future might look like.
These conversations shape everything that comes next and protect you from being steered towards products or strategies that don’t fit the life you want. When you discuss the life you want, financial decisions become much clearer and much easier to take.
The most helpful way to approach these conversations at Christmas is to group them in a way that feels natural. Start with identity, move on to relationships and family, and only then move on to money.
Start with personal conversations
Christmas gives you something rare: the mental space to ask yourself what you actually want for the next ten or twenty years of your life. This starts with a quiet inner conversation. What kind of life do you want to create now?
What do you want more and what are you willing to let go of? How do you want your health, your work, your time, and your relationships to feel? This underpins everything else because without it, financial decisions sit on shaky ground.
Once you do this inner work, it becomes much easier to talk with your partner about what retirement might look like, how to time it, and what kind of lifestyle you both envision.
Timing is about understanding your energy, your readiness for change, and whether the change is happening together or in separate stages. Lifestyle is about how you want to live when you have more control over your days.
Christmas gives you the ideal moment to ask whether your current home is still suitable for the life you want.
Christmas gives you a rare space to talk about how you each see the next few years playing out, what you want your ordinary weeks to look like, and where your hopes and expectations align.
Start small: What does an ordinary Tuesday look like in the life you want? What does the first adventure look like? When you can visualize these things, bigger decisions become much easier.
Move to relationship and family conversations
When you create a shared vision, subsequent conversations expand to include the people around you. The realities of aging parents and nearly adult children become clearer here.
Christmas often puts both ends of the family spectrum before you. As you watch your children move toward independence, new jobs, or their first financial commitment, you may also notice small but significant changes in your parents’ mobility, memory, or confidence.
These observations need not lead to formal discussions at the table, but are worth acknowledging privately. What support might your parents need in the coming years and what boundaries are realistic?
How does this shape your retirement plans? So what kind of support does it make sense to offer your children as they move forward? Some are preparing to move; others will save for the deposit. These changes can change your cost of living and financial flexibility more than people expect.
These conversations naturally go together because they all impact your retirement. Christmas can give you space to realize what has changed and make a few practical plans with a clearer mind. It also reminds you that retirement is not something you do alone; The people around you also shape it.
Explore the question of work and purpose
When personal, relationship and family issues are brought to the table, conversation often turns to business. This is the time to talk about what role you want work to play in the next chapter of your life. Do you want to step back, move on to something lighter, pursue a career in the second act, or build a more flexible portfolio of income and interests?
The further you move away from your inbox, the more you understand what you’re tired of and what still energizes you. These conversations help shape both your next steps and your financial plans for the year ahead.
Talk about the role of the house
Before you start talking about money, it’s helpful to talk about where you want to live. Your home shapes your daily life, your sense of community, and your long-term well-being, and often ties up much of your wealth.
Christmas gives you the ideal moment to ask whether your current home is still suitable for the life you want. Do you dream of living here in your 60s and 70s? Is it the right size, the right location, the right amount of buckling, and the right amount of cost to maintain?
Would staying there help you live the life you’re discussing, or would another place make more sense and at what stage? Can you unlock some of the equity tied up in your home to live better?
You don’t need answers now, but you do need to talk. It helps you understand whether your home will play a role in your retirement plan or whether it will remain a place you enjoy as long as it works.
Bring money into focus
Financial conversation becomes much easier when you talk about life, work, family and home. The numbers are starting to make sense. You can view your financial world as a series of decisions you can take action on, rather than a messy set of calculations that you hope will resolve (or ignore) on their own.
Start with the basics. Look at your expenses and the big commitments ahead of you. Make a simple budget for the amount you want to spend and save. Open your super statement and find out what you own, what you invested, what you paid in fees and whether the fund is performing well. Also consider whether your fund provides strong pre-retirement and retirement support or focuses primarily on savings.
Consider whether and when you might qualify for an age pension. Just knowing this gives you more freedom. Review your investments, contributions, and the path that will take you to “enough.” Then consider timing: When your income will transition from earned income to investment income to retirement.
With this information, consider how long you want to continue working and what financial reality supports your planned lifestyle. From here the rest falls into place. You can adjust your contributions, refine your spending, pay off any remaining debts, or quietly cheer up when you realize you’re already on the right track.
None of these need to be heavy. These are the practical conversations that naturally follow when you discuss the big picture of how you want to live.
Look beyond the paycheck
This time of year allows you to step away from your work grind long enough to ask one of the most revealing questions in retirement planning: If the size of your paycheck wasn’t the primary factor, what would you do with your days?
Most people don’t stop long enough to ask this, but it’s one of the clearest indicators of what the next chapter might look like. And if you come up empty, it’s not a failure. This simply becomes your project for the next year.
You may still want to work, but do it differently. Something lighter, more flexible, or more meaningful. You might imagine a mix of part-time work, volunteering, education, creative projects, or providing space for growth to long-ignored interests. Or you may find that you want to rest for a while before the next phase begins.
This question shifts the focus from what you are abandoning to what you are moving forward with. When you can envision the kinds of days you want, the financial and logistical decisions to support them become much easier.
In general, none of these conversations need to be formal or perfect; they just need space to get started. Christmas often gives you that space.
This is my last post for this year, and I hope I’ve encouraged you to question old assumptions about retirement and make it a more personal, less rigid path. By 2026 – talk about how you can make your retirement epic! You know you want it!
Bec Wilson is the bestselling author How to Have an Epic Retirement and new releases Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Middle Life. Writes a weekly newsletter epicretirement.net and hosts prime time podcast.
- The advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investments or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice, taking into account their personal circumstances, before making financial decisions.
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Bec Wilson is the author of How to Have an Epic Retirement and writes a weekly newsletter for pre- and post-retirees at epicretirement.net.Most Viewed for Money
