Equity Mates Sep 20, 2026 38m 23m saved
With Owen Rask, Founder of Rask and Chief Investment Officer at Rask Invest · Oliver, the community member whose portfolio was reviewed
The full age pension pays an Australian couple $48,516 a year. The retirement standard the superannuation industry calls comfortable is $78,566.
The most common Australian retirement plan is a paid-off house plus the age pension, and the rules are built to encourage it: the family home is exempt from the pension assets test. The hosts spent the middle of this episode on four reasons that plan has stopped working.
"So you're thinking, okay, I'm a couple. I've paid off my house. I can get $48,516 in income a year."
Equity Mates runs this as part of Super September, its series on getting Australians engaged with their superannuation, and the second half hands a listener's portfolio to Owen Rask, founder of Rask and chief investment officer of Rask Invest, whose analyst team builds core ETF and share portfolios for more than 4,000 Australians.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 38 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
The full age pension is 62% of a comfortable retirement for a couple, and 58% for a single person
The couple's figure is $48,516 a year against a $78,566 standard
Retiring with a mortgage has gone from unusual to normal: mortgage-free 55- to 64-year-olds fell from 80% in 2001 to 56% by 2016
Average housing debt in that age group now runs above $230,000
The share of renters aged 65 and over doubled in two decades, from 4.6% to 9.4%, and a renting single needs roughly twice the super balance an owner does
The rules have moved before: a 2017 assets-test change cut 91,000 people off the pension entirely and reduced payments for 235,000 more
Three central banks raised rates in the space of a fortnight, and markets put the RBA's odds at 76 to 85%
An Australian rocket company is talking to the Nasdaq and the NYSE about a 2028 listing, and has not called the ASX
All of the listener's ETFs were up and all of his individual stocks were down, which Owen Rask said is the ordinary outcome rather than a personal failing
Rask's case against buying an ex-US fund: 30 to 40% of the revenue of US-listed companies already comes from outside the US
1. The Fed Hikes Into Oil
The episode opened on the US rate decision. Inflation is above the 2% target, oil prices are high and rising, and energy costs are feeding into everything else, so the Federal Reserve raised by 25 basis points into a 3.75 to 4% range. The hosts stressed how unanimous it was: "It was a unanimous decision. All 12 members of the Fed's rate setting board voted for it." A majority of participants expect at least one more rise before the end of the year.
Donald Trump, who appointed Kevin Warsh expecting cuts, posted on Truth Social that US rates "should be 1% or less" because the country is "the best credit in the world by far." The hosts' reply was that a booming economy is the condition under which a central bank raises rates rather than cuts them.
The rest of the world is in the same position. The European Central Bank raised the week before, and the Reserve Bank of Australia meets on 28 and 29 September, with markets pricing "a 76 to 85% chance" of a 25 basis point rise "to 4.6%." For Australian mortgage holders, the hosts noted, that compounds what is already happening in housing.
2. The ASX Keeps Losing
The second news item was a complaint the show has made before. Gilmour Space, a Queensland satellite and rocket company, has raised half a billion US dollars in a series E and is now in listing talks.
The hosts' summary of it: "They've begun talks with both the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange about a 2028 IPO. Who they haven't started talking to is the ASX."
Their argument is that Australia has the ingredients for a deeper market. It is the third-largest credit market in the world, has a $4.5 trillion superannuation industry behind its equity investors, and sits next to the fastest-growing region in the world. What it does not do is keep its own companies, with Atlassian and Canva as the standing examples.
The sharpest illustration was IREN, the Bitcoin miner the ASX blocked, which listed on the Nasdaq instead and pivoted its compute to AI: "They have absolutely boomed and their market cap is now larger than the ASX's," and, the hosts added, "Also larger than Qantas, like big company now."
The same pattern runs through the region. Grab listed on the Nasdaq, Coupang in New York, and the Indonesian super app at home, while "Sea Limited listed on New York Stock Exchange at $5 billion, now worth 60 billion." Rocket Lab, from New Zealand, chose the Nasdaq too.
The counterargument the hosts put to themselves is that deeper capital and more analyst coverage will always pull fast-growing technology companies to the US, which they accept. Their objection is that Australia does not even win the dual listings, so local investors get no access at all.
The exception proves the point. Life360 came to Australia on a deliberate strategy: "Life 360 is an American company, but their argument was we would rather be the big fish in a small pond rather than an anonymous growth company in a massive pond in the US." The ASX published an article in 2023 using it as evidence of competing globally. Less than a year later the company added a US listing.
3. Retiring With a Mortgage
The Super September segment took on the myth that a house plus the age pension is enough. The hosts gave four reasons it is false, and the first is that the paid-off house is disappearing.
On renters, the numbers come from the HILDA survey: "So in 2001 it was 4.6% of renters age 65 and over. Now it's 9.4%. It's doubled in a little over two decades." The state-level move is faster still: "New South Wales alone saw a 74% increase in renters aged 55 or over between the 2011 census and the 2021 census."
Among those who do own, the mortgage is outlasting the career. "80% was the number in 2001 of homeowners aged between 55 and 64 who were mortgage free. However, that number is now only 56% by 2016," and "The average housing debt for that cohort now exceeds $230,000." A 2026 Finder survey found "44% of mortgage holders expect to retire with mortgage debt or have already retired and had mortgage debt."
That matters because the entire retirement-planning framework assumes the opposite. The ASFA standard the industry quotes puts a comfortable retirement at "730,000 for a couple 630,000 for a single person" in savings, and those balances assume the home is paid off. For renters the gap is worse. On Super Consumers Australia's figures, a single retiree who rents needs "roughly twice the super balance someone who owns."
4. A House Pays No Income
The second reason took the hosts about a minute, because the point is arithmetic rather than argument. A house is an asset that pays its owner nothing while they live in it: "If you're living in it no one's paying you the rent."
They gave one caveat, the federal scheme that lets a retiree draw equity: "There is one caveat, which the government does offer a home equity access scheme, which is essentially a reverse mortgage. Reasonable interest rate, 3.95% interest a year at time of recording, compounds fortnightly."
The objection they raised to it is what the house was for in the first place. Most people holding a home into retirement intend it as the asset that funds aged care or passes to their children, and drawing equity to cover groceries and a caravan trip spends that down while interest accrues against it.
5. The Pension Is 62%
The third reason is the size of the payment. From 20 September 2026 the full age pension is $1,237.70 a fortnight for a single person, which is $32,180 a year, and $1,866 a fortnight for a couple.
What a couple actually receives
So you're thinking, okay, I'm a couple. I've paid off my house. I can get $48,516 in income a year.
Equity Mates
The ASFA comfortable standard for a single person is "55,923 a year," which leaves a shortfall of about $22,000. The hosts did the division on air: "So for a single it's 58%. And then for a couple you said it was 78,566 which is 62% of the total."
Their conclusion is that superannuation is not optional even for someone who plans to rely on the pension, because the remaining 38% has to come from somewhere — and most people want more than the standard definition of comfortable, which covers neither helping grandchildren nor much travel.
6. The Rules Can Change
The fourth reason is political rather than financial. The hosts pointed at the assets-test change that took effect in 2017: "So, on the 1st of January 2017, there was a rule change that unfortunately cut 91,000 people off the pension entirely and reduced payments for another 235,000 people."
The thresholds moved a long way with it. "The cut off for a homeowning couple fell from about 1.15 million to 823,000 and for a single home owner fell from 775,500 to $547,000."
The eligibility age is the other lever. "The age pension age is currently 67 years old. Services Australia has said there's no plans to change it, but the qualifying age not too long ago was increased from 65 to 67." The hosts' reason for not trusting that is recent history: "In the 2014 budget, that famous Joe Hockey budget, the policy was to raise the pension age from 65 to 70." It reached 67 before Scott Morrison scrapped the rest in 2018 ahead of an election.
The structural contrast they drew is between money the government promises and money you own. Superannuation rules can change too, but the balance belongs to the member; the pension depends on a future government continuing to pay it at the current rate, while public debt is one of the reasons rates are rising in the first place.
7. ETFs Green, Stocks Red
The last segment is Pimp My Portfolio, in which a listener brings a portfolio to an expert. Oliver, who introduced himself by saying "I've been a uni student for the last over six or seven years and now I've stepped into the workforce," brought six ETFs and a handful of individual stocks, and Owen Rask reviewed it.
Rask started with the pattern in the average prices Oliver had sent over.
Every fund was up and every stock was down
all of your ETFs are in the green and all of your share positions are in the red.
Owen Rask
He took the sting out of it immediately, saying he has had the same experience and that it is what the evidence predicts.
Most individual stocks lose to the index, and that is the base rate
For those of you that don't know, the majority of stocks will not beat the stock market index.
Owen Rask
The scale was small either way. As one host pointed out, "94% of your portfolio is in the ETFs and I think it's about 6% in the stocks."
Oliver's problem was not the analysis but the execution, and he was direct about it.
He knows what to sell and cannot make himself sell it
I've found it really challenging to sell a losing position.
Oliver
He gave two reasons for holding: the positions are small enough not to matter, and a capital loss might be useful against a future gain. The holding he defended was Medical Developments, the maker of the inhaled analgesic known in Australia as the green whistle, which he knows from studying paramedicine and has seen work.
Rask did not dismiss the passion holding. He noted that acceptance varies by market, so the product's reach is narrower than its reputation in Australia, and then backed the business.
The green whistle has no real local competitor
So that business definitely has a competitive advantage in my opinion in it in its home markets.
Owen Rask
On CSL, the other loser in the portfolio, his diagnosis was financial rather than commercial: a balance sheet levered up under very low interest rates by the previous management, with acquisitions outside the core business that now need unwinding.
The business is fine; the capital structure was the mistake
that was just overleveraged by the former management team who were just happy to squeeze the lemon on the balance sheet in super low interest rates and now they pay the piper, right?
Owen Rask
8. Set It While You're Young
Oliver's real question was about timing. He has been migrating toward a simpler, lower-cost line-up and keeps stalling because switching triggers capital gains tax.
The tax bill is what stops him tidying up
every time I do this, I'm concerned that I'm facing these tax consequences before I'm really allowing my money to compound.
Oliver
Rask's answer was that waiting makes the problem larger rather than smaller.
The moment to restructure is before the gains get big
Can I just say, Oliver, you've just finished uni, you're just entering the workforce, like now is the time to set the portfolio.
Owen Rask
The overlap does not go away on its own, he said; the positions keep growing, the embedded gain keeps growing, and the reluctance grows with it. His practical suggestion was to take the gain in the same tax year as the losses on the stocks, while the income and the marginal rate are still low.
Do it now, at a lower tax rate, and then keep buying
Your income will grow. So, you're in a higher tax bracket, cop it now and maybe do it in the same year that you cop some of the tax losses on the stocks, but just get set like you have decades ahead of you.
Owen Rask
One host added that most investors go through two or three of these restructures as they learn, and that the frustration is misplaced: over decades, a simpler portfolio pays for the tax bill that created it.
Rask's version was shorter
you're going to be earning more. So yeah, rip the bandaid off.
Owen Rask
9. Cutting the Overlap
The portfolio itself held two Australian funds that do nearly the same thing, two with Nasdaq 100 exposure, a global developed-markets fund excluding the US, and an emerging-markets fund. Rask's first cut was the ex-US fund, and his reasoning was about what US-listed companies actually are.
A US index is already a global portfolio on the revenue line
give or take 30 to 40% of the revenue from US companies comes from outside the United States. So the businesses themselves are internally diversified.
Owen Rask
His argument is that buying a separate ex-US fund to escape US weighting misreads where the economic exposure comes from.
Diversification by customer, not by listing venue
you don't need to go and invest in Italy to get a different company or just for the sake of diversification if the best way to get exposure to that economy is through US companies and do that. That's my philosophy.
Owen Rask
He was careful not to make it a rule. If an investor wants exposure beyond the US, he would rather they take it deliberately, through a China or India fund, than hold a broad ex-US fund at an 8% weight where it changes little. He also said the choice between a global fund and an S&P 500 or Nasdaq fund matters less than investors think, with the caveat that the case for global exposure is a real one.
The reason to hold something outside the US is that dominance is not permanent
there is a world where the United States is not the most dominant stock market. There is a reality of our future where that's the case.
Owen Rask
The two Australian funds are the other duplication, and the hosts were blunt that they are effectively the same product, with the complication that both carry gains. The sequencing advice was to do one thing at a time: cut the ex-US fund first, then consider consolidating the Australian side, and leave the global fund alone.
He would not lose sleep over the remaining overlap
I wouldn't sweat too much about whether or not BGBL's in there. I think it's a fine compliment.
Owen Rask
Bonus Insights
Oliver identified every problem before anyone told him
The host's closing note was that in the pre-recording conversation Oliver had named each issue the segment went on to cover, which he treated as the sign that the portfolio is in good hands.
The ethical motivation came first, the structure second
Oliver described wanting to work purposefully and invest in line with that, which is part of why he has been consolidating toward one issuer's range.
Why the pension assets test pushes money into the house
The hosts noted the incentive that creates the myth in the first place: an owner-occupied home is excluded from the assets test, so upgrading the house is not penalized while saving outside it is.
Government debt is the other reason rates are rising
Alongside inflation, the hosts pointed at investors demanding a higher premium to keep funding government deficits, and the two ways out of it — real spending restraint or inflating the debt away.
The episode's bottom line is that both halves of the standard Australian plan are weaker than they look: the pension covers about three-fifths of a comfortable retirement and its rules are a political variable, while the portfolio that is meant to cover the rest is usually carrying duplicated funds that get more expensive to fix every year they are left alone.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Rask (Owen Rask's firm. Its analyst team builds core ETF and share portfolios, and he reviewed the listener's holdings here)
Gilmour Space (The Queensland rocket and satellite company that raised $500M US in a series E and is in listing talks with the Nasdaq and the NYSE, not the ASX)
IREN (The Bitcoin miner the ASX blocked, now a Nasdaq-listed AI cloud provider the hosts say is worth more than the ASX itself)
ASX (The exchange the hosts spend the segment criticizing for losing listings, including the Life360 episode it publicized in 2023)
Sea Limited, Grab and Coupang (Southeast Asian companies that listed in New York rather than Sydney; Sea went public at $5B and the hosts put it at $60B now)
Rocket Lab (The New Zealand company that chose the Nasdaq, the hosts' nearest-neighbor example)
Life360 (The US company that listed in Australia to be a big fish in a small pond, then added a US listing inside a year)
Atlassian and Canva (The two Australian technology companies the hosts use as the standing examples of listings lost to the US)
Qantas (Their local yardstick for market value, now smaller than IREN)
Medical Developments International (Maker of the inhaled analgesic known as the green whistle; the listener's largest single-stock holding and the one Rask said has a genuine competitive advantage at home)
CSL (The blood plasma and vaccines company in the portfolio; Rask blamed the balance sheet decisions of former management rather than the business)
Services Australia (Administers the age pension, and has said there are no plans to move the qualifying age from 67)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The HILDA Survey (Source of the renter figures: 4.6% of over-65s renting in 2001 against 9.4% now)
ASFA's Retirement Standard (The comfortable-retirement benchmark the hosts measure the pension against, at $78,566 a year for a couple)
Super Consumers Australia (Its finding that a single renter needs roughly twice the balance an owner does)
The Home Equity Access Scheme (The government reverse mortgage the hosts costed at 3.95% a year, compounding fortnightly)
Finder (Its 2026 survey found 44% of mortgage holders expect to carry the debt into retirement)
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