Helping Australian retirees to Live Well at Home

Household Capital founder and Managing Director discusses decreasing concerns about longevity and increasing confidence in long-term funding, housing and wellbeing for Australian retirees.

Transcription

Holly:

Well Joshua Funder is helping retirees to live well at home, reducing uncertainty about longevity and increasing confidence in long term housing, funding and wellbeing as well. Joshua is here for more. Lovely to have your company today.

Joshua Funder:

Holly, good to be with you.

Holly:

Now, I wanted to start our conversation. If you can tell us exactly how you're facilitating retirees?

Joshua Funder:

The breakthrough here Holly is, the family home can now be the best place to live, but also the right way to fund retirement and enabling Australians across our land, to be able to do both those things, gives them confidence in their future. Most retirees are too worried about what's coming and too worried about not having enough and we can solve their problems.

Holly:

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a remarkable thing that you're doing here and sort of filling this void and it's so good that we're having these kind of conversations as well. Now you talk about the pillars that sort of underpin this. Can you break those down for us?

Joshua Funder:

Look, we've always had three pillars in our approach, and nicely enough the government last year endorsed those three pillars. The first one is the pension, that's really important to most people, it's the taxes you paid coming back to fund your retirement. The second one is your compulsory savings, for most people that's superannuation. But baby boomers don't tend to have enough. They only got 3% halfway through their working lives. And the third pillar is that family home, private savings. Now just think about this Holly, most Australians have about $200,000 super when they retire, but they've got $800,000 in home equity. So all we're doing is delivering back Australian's wealth across those three pillars to make sure they can get through long and happy retirements.

Holly:

Yeah, it's remarkable. And I mean, a lot of this comes from a lack of education as well, and a lack of conversation about knowing what's available to you. Now when we talk about, I guess the younger generations at the moment, they might look at retiring and think it so far away, you don't have to worry about it, but really they should really be thinking about these things early though, right?

Joshua Funder:

Awareness is key both for retirees and for homeowners. But what this also tells is an understanding of the national story, about the value of home ownership. And for younger people watching, it's really important to understand that you can get into the right home for you, and you can use that, not just as your home, but as an investment and through your life, you can watch that investment grow and now in retirement, you can stay in your home, but you can access the value of that investment to fund your retirement. That's how your home can be the best place to live and the right way to fund your retirement. So as people are investing in their homes, they've now got access to that investment in their retirement, it's a game changer.

Holly:

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you guys have just done a funding raise at the moment, talk us through that. Where will the funding be going? How significant is that for you guys as a business and for your customers as well?

Joshua Funder:

Well, let's talk about where it's going. It's going to our customers. And what it does is it makes home equity funding for retirement, more widely available, to meet a national need. We're really proud of that. All told there's a trillion dollars of home equity that retirees have already saved. And this funding announcement helps us deliver that and that wealth back to retirees, that's important. For us as a company, it's really important, it's a global endorsement of what we are doing by Citibank and by IFM Investors. But let me quote, IFM Investors, it's quite simple. This is a risk adjusted return for our investors, but it's also a social dividend for our customers. And what we're fundamentally doing here is improving the availability and the quality of retirement funding and housing. So we're really, really proud to be able to help this funding round to deliver for our customers.

Holly:

Yeah, and as you should be. And I mean, just going back to that point I made there it's about having these conversations and helping people to sort of get ahead in life rather than feeling like they're constantly drowning in quick sand and can't get ahead. And you guys are really starting that conversation and helping people to get ahead and get ahead early as well. Joshua, thank you so much.

Joshua Funder:

Holly, thank you.

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