This week I’ll be kicking off the first of a three part series on retirement planning. Today I’ll be exploring what you should be focusing on if retirement is around a decade away. Next episode we will fast forward to being five years out from retirement, and then in the 3rd episode we can see where your focus should lie when retirement is just a year away.

The key is to progressively optimise as retirement gets closer. As retirement nears, you gain greater certainty as to the level of retirement savings you’ve been able to amass, and your rate of spending. For those with children you also gain greater clarity on your broader family situation. Have all the kids moved out? Are you still helping them out or are they now fully independent? And assuming they are out, does staying in the family home continue to make sense?

When people think about retirement planning, they often assume it’s something you really focus on in the final couple of years. But in reality, what you do 10 years out often has the biggest impact on how your retirement actually plays out. Because at that point, you’ve still got time on your side.

Today I want to walk through what really matters when you’re about a decade away from finishing work.

1. Consider What You Want Retirement to Look Like

10 years out from retirement it’s unrealistic to think that you can lock in all the details with a high level of precision. Nonetheless, it’s helpful to have some broad targets to work towards. Given you’ve identified that you’re around 10 years out from retirement, this suggests you have at least determined the ideal timing for your exit from the workplace, an important precursor to successful planning. Other key inputs in your planning would be:

How much do you want to spend each year?
Will you stay in your current home?
Travel plans?
Helping kids?

It’s okay for there to be movement in these goals in the future, just make your best estimate, because that then provides the basis for targets to be established.

2. Lean Into Super (But Don’t Ignore Flexibility)

At 10 years out, super is still your most powerful wealth-building tool.

This is the phase where:

Salary sacrifice becomes really valuable
Carry-forward concessional contributions might come into play
They can meaningfully boost their retirement position

But—and this is important—you don’t want everything trapped in super.

If you retire before 60, whether by choice, or because it is forced upon you, flexibility is essential. You’ll want some money outside super. So it’s about balance:

Super for tax efficiency
Non-super investments for access and flexibility

3. Don’t Get Conservative Too Early

This is a big one. At 55, some people start thinking “Maybe I should dial down the risk.”

And emotionally, that makes sense. But financially, it can be a mistake. You might have 40 more years ahead of you. Forgoing 1 or 2 percent in return each year will have a huge impact on how long your retirement savings will last.

At 10 years out from retirement, be as aggressive with your super fund investment allocation as you can tolerate.

To illustrate, with $900,000 combined super, if you earn 6% a year for the next 10 years, you will have around $1.6million to retire on. But if instead you are able to earn 8%, so not crazy aggressive, but just a couple of percent more, your retirement benefit is boosted by $300,000, to around $1.9million.

So at this stage, growth assets still matter.

4. Have a Clear Debt Strategy

Probably the most common question I get in my Ask an Expert column is some version of “should I be directing my savings towards clearing my mortgage or boosting my super?”

Debt becomes more important the closer you get to retirement. Not because debt is inherently bad—but because it reduces flexibility. We all hope to retire at a time of our choosing, but that is not always how things work out.

99 times out of 100 you want to be debt free once retired. You don’t want to have to find income for mortgage repayments once you are living off your retirement savings. So the question becomes, “What’s our plan for this mortgage?”

5. Review Insurance

You might be paying for insurance you no longer need. Plus, insurance gets more expensive as we get older. Because this cost usually comes out of your super account, insurance costs harm your ultimate retirement benefit.

Life insurance is principally about debts and dependants. In your 30’s, these two items likely loomed large, and so hopefully your life insurance (and other complementary forms of cover) reflected this. But 10 years out from retirement these pressures are usually greatly reduced, if not entirely in the rear vision mirror.

Now is the time to review your levels of cover and consider whether the cover you have remains right for you.

To summarise then, if you are 10 years out from retirement: