Superannuation

Lifetime Income Streams are where you invest your super money into a ‘guaranteed’ income stream that will continue to pay you an income until your death.

Like Fixed Term income streams, one of the benefits of these income streams is that your income is guaranteed, and you know what income you are going to receive each year. Furthermore, the amount of income can be indexed (for example, increased with inflation) for life. Therefore, if you live for a long time the income will keep up with increases in cost of living.

Again, like fixed term income streams however, the earning rates used to determine the amount of income you will receive can be comparatively low. One of the major limitations of lifetime income streams historically were their lack of flexibility.  It was generally not possible to access any of the capital once the income stream had commenced and if the member was to die prematurely, any residual capital might not be available to the members beneficiaries.  This inflexibility reduced the appeal of these types of products.