Financial Planning
Your super statement shouldn’t read like
a foreign language.
We translate the financial side of retirement into plain English, then build a plan around it. Tax, super, income, the lot. Explained so it actually makes sense.
100+
Local clients in the Hunter
20+ years
Of financial experience
Client First
No banks. No conflicts.
If this sounds familiar
None of this stuff
makes sense to me.
It’s the line we hear more than any other on first calls.
Your super statement turns up in the mail. You read it. You’re reasonably sure it’s saying something important. But “preserved”, “non-concessional”, “deeming rate” and “transition to retirement” all sit there like words from a textbook nobody gave you. So you put it on the kitchen bench, and there it stays.
You’re not the only one. Most people we talk to have been working their whole lives, paying super into a fund, and have never had it explained to them in a way that actually makes sense. That’s not a failing on your part. That’s a failing of an industry that learned to talk in code.
Financial planning at Nest starts with a different premise. If you can’t understand what’s being recommended and why, the advice isn’t doing its job. So we explain it properly, in normal words, until you can repeat it back to your partner over dinner.
What we cover
Three things almost every retiree needs
sorted out.
Whether you’ve started thinking about retirement or you’ve just stopped working, these are the moving parts that need to be in the right places.
Making sure your super is doing what you actually need it to do.
While you’re working, your super is a savings account. The day you retire, it has to turn into something different: a salary replacement. That changes everything about how it should be structured and where the money is invested. We make sure your super is set up to pay you a regular income when work stops, and that it’s not sitting in a default option that no longer suits you.
In plain terms: we change your super from a piggy bank into a pay cheque. And we make sure the engine running it is the right one for someone your age, with your risk appetite, with your timeline.
Your tax situation is about to change. Most people don’t realise how much.
The day your salary stops, almost everything about your tax position shifts. Income drawn from super is taxed differently to income drawn from a pay cheque. After 60, a lot of it is tax-free entirely. Get the structure right, and you can keep thousands more of your money each year. Get it wrong, and you can give thousands away to the tax office that you didn’t need to.
In plain terms: there’s a window around retirement where the tax rules work in your favour, but only if you know how to use them. We make sure you do.
A few thousand dollars a year you might be leaving on the table.
Centrelink rules are dense, change every year, and most people assume they earn too much or have too much in super to qualify. A lot of the time, that assumption is wrong. The age pension, even in part, can add real income to your retirement. The rules around how it’s calculated are complex but knowable.
In plain terms: we work out exactly what you’re entitled to and lodge the application for you. So you’re getting every dollar you’re owed, without spending three weeks trying to decode a Centrelink form.
Your accountant isn’t going anywhere
We work alongside your existing professionals. Not instead of them.
If you’ve got an accountant you trust, a solicitor who’s looked after your will for a decade, or an adviser somewhere else who’s helped with one part of the picture, none of them are being replaced. Dom’s job is to handle the retirement-specific parts of your financial life.
Most of our clients keep their accountant for tax returns. Their solicitor for estate documents. Their GP for, well, GP things. Dom slots into the team you already have, focused on the retirement piece.
The last thing we want is to add another voice that contradicts the people who’ve already earned your trust.
A word on value
Quality advice that doesn’t eat your savings.
A few of our clients came to Nest after being quoted fees of nearly $10,000 by the big firms for a financial plan that, when they read it, may or may not have actually been in their best interest.
Dom watched that pattern play out for twenty years. Fees creeping higher. Advice getting more product-driven. The people who needed help most being priced out, or worse, sold a product that suited the firm more than them. It’s the exact thing the Royal Commission spent two years documenting.
Nest’s approach is the opposite. Fees are clear, fixed, and quoted upfront. The advice is built entirely around you, with no product quotas and no sales targets. And the work is structured around what you actually need, not padded out to justify a higher invoice.
The way we think about it: if the advice doesn’t leave you measurably better off than the cost of getting it, we haven’t done our job.
What clients say
People who finally got it explained properly.
“Dominic explained everything in plain English. He talked us through every step and made sure we understood exactly what was happening with our money.”
“Nothing was too much trouble, very thorough and explained everything in easy-to-follow terms. We feel so much more confident about our retirement.”
READY WHEN YOU ARE
Let's talk about your financial plan.
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No hard sell. No pressure. Most clients say they wish they’d called sooner.