Getting ready to retire is hard work. Send in your questions and we’ll help answer them

Monday, 15 December 2025

The decisions you make on the road to retirement will determine what type of life you have in your golden years.

Retirement questions answered: from time to time, we will pick a question sent in by a reader and offer a response written by experienced business and personal finance writer Gill South. You can read more here and submit questions below.

Retirement struggles

If personal finance expert columns about what people in their 50s and 60s should have all organised for retirement make you feel like going into the foetal position (because you are so not sorted), this column is the place for you.

Every week, I’m going to be talking about personal finance stuff that is preoccupying a lot of us Gen X’ers and babyboomers.

I have plenty of concerns and want to hear about your worries too, and I will call on excellent experts to help us with our questions.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I have been writing about personal finance and retirement for a good 20 years on and off, so I have a fair idea of what I should be doing. I just haven’t quite got round to doing it because life has gotten in the way.

One of my favourite books is E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. It’s about the hapless reporter, Quoyle who goes to Newfoundland with his kids, after losing his no-good wife in a car accident. His editor, not known for his tact, cruelly puts him onto the newspaper round of covering local car wrecks as well as the shipping news. It’s nothing personal: he also puts an old bachelor on the homemaking news round. You get the gist.

So with this column, I think of myself a bit like Quoyle, covering a topic that I find quite painful, (because I’m not sorted) but I need to face it.

A little bit about me and my situation: I am in my late 50s, married with two young adult sons, and my KiwiSaver is nothing to write home about, partly because we lived in the US for a few years, and the fact I’ve largely been self-employed. My KiwiSaver is certainly not going to see me through a long old age.

One of my most pressing financial chores ahead, is I am told I have no hope of even getting my NZ pension when I turn 65 until I find the pension funds I was paying into in the UK during the 1990s when working there as a journalist.

Gill south has been writing about retirement and personal finance for decades.

So this is going to be one of my first tasks on the to-do list that I’ll be talking about here – finding and extracting those funds if possible. And I know I’m not alone – a lot of us who did the old OE in London, didn’t give pension plans a lot of thought, but we paid into them and have to look into this.

In recent years, a googly or two (we love cricket in our house) that life has thrown at us include job redundancy and some unexpected work on our house which took a fair chunk out of our savings.

On the plus side , we have paid our mortgage off thanks to an inheritance so we feel very lucky.

My husband and I are both self-employed and we enjoy the variety of work but it’s not totally secure.

We will be selling our home, downsizing, to release some equity in the next year.

I will be writing a few columns on what to think about when downsizing your home – it can be such a fraught experience because you can’t afford to make mistakes at this time in life and it is so easy to do. I really hate false economies, so is it the best thing to do?

There are many decisions to make at this time of our lives and I think we in our demographic have a lot of questions about what’s ahead.

There is this general feeling of running out of runway at this time of our lives. But it’s important not to panic. After all, my grandmother lived till 90, so I plan to stick around and keep writing until someone takes the keyboard away from me.

Maybe think of this as an agony aunt column for your financial worries as you head into retirement.

What questions do you have as you head into the final decade of your working life? I want to hear about it and if it’s a common concern, I’ll look into it.

As Red Green, the host of a favourite Canadian comedy DIY show (The Red Green Show) we used to watch in Pennsylvania would say: “I’m pulling for ya, we’re all in this together. “

Gill South is a freelance business writer and author who has written for news websites and businesses including Stuff, Trade Me, NZ Herald, MyHR, and BusinessDesk. She was the founding Money/Business Editor of the Herald on Sunday. She is also the author of “Because We’re Worth It: a ‘whereto from here’ for today’s working mother,” published in 2009 by Penguin NZ.

If you have a question, you’d like answered, drop it in the document below. The more detail you provide (please don’t include personal banking information), the more likely it is that we’ll look into answering it.