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Let's go through a bunch of retirement scenarios in Canwi. All of these characters are fictional and this is not financial advice, but this is how you could go through setting up retirement planning and walk through some of these scenarios.

Say we have Daza and Shaza. Daza is 50, they have two kids, Crystal and Jaden, and they're looking to scope out their retirement — what that might look like and how much they can spend. They also have a goal of wanting to help their two kids with home deposits before maximising their own retirement lifestyle.

They're set up with Daza on a $110k salary and Shaza on an $80k salary. They have some savings, an offset account, a mortgage, superannuation across their two funds, and are currently focused on paying down that mortgage.

Their initial cash flow priority is to pay off the offset, and once that's done, all spare cash goes into savings so they can help their kids in a few years' time. I've set that up in their plan — they'll be debt-free in a few years, close out the home loan, and then move any outstanding offset balance into savings.

They're then able to give Jaden a $200k deposit to help with a home deposit (Jaden turns 21 in 2029, so I've scheduled the deposits to help each kid out around age 26). Similarly, they'll help Crystal with a deposit, and we readjust expenses once Crystal moves out, at around age 60 for the parents.

They then start adding extra into their super, maxing out the concessional contributions that are expiring for that year — they'll do that for the next six years. Shaza does the same thing, but continues until 2045 (you can move these around as needed).

They also plan to downsize — once the kids have left the nest, the house is too big for them, so they sell it and buy a nice apartment. A few years later, they both go part-time, reducing their work hours and starting to enjoy retirement — any spare cash is now spent on enjoying retirement rather than saved for the future.

They fully retire at 67, the age pension eligibility age. They won't qualify for any pension in that first year, but it should start kicking in — as a partial pension — a bit later, up to around age 86, once their assets have drawn down enough. You can see how the partial pension kicks in at a later date once their asset position changes. You can also model things like reducing expenses with age, as they settle down and are less able to go on as many holidays as they'd like.

That's a partial pension scenario — how about a full pension scenario?

Say we have Debbie. She's currently renting, was a stay-at-home mum for a good chunk of her life, and has just gone through a divorce, so she's back in the rental market without a huge amount of assets to her name. She got a bit of super out of the divorce proceedings and has about $10,000 in a savings account, and is trying to plan her retirement. She earns around $80k working as an assistant in the city.

We've added the Retire event, along with the Age Pension kicking in as soon as she's eligible. By the time she reaches 67, she'll have around $100k in super and about $140k in her cash account. Looking at the income stream, you can see on the government benefits breakdown what the assets test and income test would each produce, and which one applies in her situation. You can also hover over any of these calculations to get a full breakdown of how everything's calculated.

There's also a new feature for drawing down particular assets in retirement planning.

In this scenario, I have Raj, who's also 50, owns his house outright, and is looking to maximise his lifestyle in retirement. He has an investment portfolio of about $125k in a broad-based index fund, and plans to maximise that in the short term using money flow settings — putting all spare cash into the index fund, with anything above that going into savings, then drawing down from that index fund to fund an early retirement lifestyle.

What does that look like in the Plan Builder? There's maxing out super earlier on, changing the money flow settings to "spend the rest," and adjusting expenses so Raj can enjoy more holidays. You can see, for example, that in the first year there's a partial sale of his ETF portfolio — he'd need to sell some of it to help fund about $40k of expenses that year.

One of the cool features we've recently added is the ability to project how proposed CGT changes might affect your retirement planning. Say Raj wants to compare his plan against the proposed new CGT changes — this is the exact same scenario, but in Scenario Settings I've enabled the inflation-adjusted CGT changes as currently proposed, along with the negative gearing reforms and tax offset changes. Under this scenario, Raj has a greater chance of running out of money later in retirement.

To manage that, all Raj would need to do is adjust his expenses for the rest of retirement. The CGT impact on his portfolio means he might need to reduce his expenses a bit earlier — around age 79 instead of 80.