Activate your income account

What is an income account?

An income account lets you use your super savings to provide a regular income. At the same time your money is still invested and working hard for you. It’s what your super has been building towards throughout your working life.

There are two types:

Pre-retirement account – that can be activated while you’re still working. It can help boost your super or ease you into retirement by cutting back on your working hours, while providing an income to supplement your take-home pay.
Post-retirement account – for when you’re fully retired or have turned 65. It provides more options to manage your income while your savings are invested in a tax-free environment.

Is an income account right for you?

There are limits to how much you can transfer to your income account and there are other aspects that you should consider before activating your income account, including:

Tax implications.
Your current and ongoing financial commitments.
Any impact on eligibility for social security payments, including the age pension.
Your desired retirement lifestyle and life expectancy.

You can find more information on your eligibility and whether an income account is right for you in our Income account guide.

Eligibility

To open an income account you need to have:

At least $50,000 to transfer from your super account.
Reached your preservation age (between 55 and 60, depending on when you were born).

To activate your Post-retirement income account you also need to either:

Be permanently retired from the workforce after you’ve reached your preservation age
Have left you employer after reaching 60 (though you’re free to work for another employer)
Reached age 65, or
Have been assessed as totally and permanently disabled.

If you’re eligible, there are a few steps you’ll need to take to set up your income account:

Choose your payment preferences

You have the flexibility to choose how often you receive your income payments and from where. You can choose:

Your payment frequency: fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or annually.
Which investment option and the proportion or priority you want your payments to be drawn from.

Choose your regular payments from minimum and maximum amounts

You can choose the amount of your regular payments, as long as they are within the minimum and (any) maximum amounts that apply to your account.

For Pre-retirement accounts, your payments will need to be between 4% and 10% of your balance each year.
For Post-retirement income accounts, the minimum annual payments range from 4% to 14% of your balance each year, depending on your age. There’s no maximum limit.

Our Income account guide provides more details.

Set up your investment strategy

Just like your super account, you can choose where your money is invested as well as where it’s drawn from.

For most people, the investment earnings from your super after retirement are the biggest source of savings that support your income in retirement. Being clever about how you set up the investment strategy for your income account can make a big difference to how long it lasts.

Plan your estate

Should something happen to you, it’s important to let us know how you want your benefit to be paid. For more information, go to our Nominate beneficiaries page.

Activate

Simply complete and return the Income account activation form which you can find in our Income account guide to advise us of your chosen options, provide any other required supporting documentation, and we’ll take care of the rest.