10 Superannuation
Superannuation Retirement Income Streams
Transition to Retirement (TTR) Income Stream
Why would you want to start taking a pension from your super before you retire?
One reason may be that you are wanting to ease into retirement by working part-time and the pension can be used to supplement your salary income.
If you reduce your employment to part-time work, you may find your salary is unlikely to meet your living expenses.
One way to generate the additional income needed would be to commence a TTR income stream and withdrawn a regular pension.
One important point to consider is that you may be drawing down on your super earlier than expected, so this may have long term consequences, such as reducing your balance earlier than anticipated in retirement.
Another way that a TTR pension is utilised is to allow a member who may still be working full-time to be able to salary sacrifice into super. The pension income withdrawn provides the member with additional cash flow to compensate for the loss of cashflow from the salary sacrifice thereby reducing taxable salary and therefore tax payable. Remember that once a member is aged 60, all withdrawals from their TTR pension account will be tax-free.