Can You Only Withdraw Profit From SMSF After You Turn 60?

If you’re a member, drawing a pension is only possible where you’ve met preservation age. Now there are so many rules around this, but preservation age depends on when you were born.
So if you’re born after 1964, which maths is suggesting you are born after that day, your preservation age is 60. If you’re born before 1960, your preservation age is 55. But your preservation age is when your super is accessible, as long as you meet some additional conditions.

Let’s take the most common one, which is retirement. So if you’re over 60 and you retire, or you cease employment (which is actually the way it’s written) then you can access some of your super. You don’t have to be retired when you hit preservation age to draw a transition to retirement pension. You can access up to 10% maximum of your fund per year, under a transition to retirement pension. Then once you hit 65, you don’t need to be retired to necessarily draw down on your super, which is pretty cool. So there’s a whole heap of layers there.

Now, if you’re 30 – a lot of our younger clients say, “Hey, why would I contribute to super? I can’t touch it for another 30 years.”

Well, yes and no.

So we’ve talked about ways where you can fund other projects, like developing properties. You can develop property, especially if you’ve got another unrelated business partner, there’s ways you can access your super balance there to fund outside of super property development.

There’s some really cool things we can do to not necessarily access the money to spend personally, but access it to grow our wealth. There’s the distinction.

So yes, you can’t just draw the money out, but to say it’s completely untouchable and it’s just useless to you, is a misconception of super when you’re young. 

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