Helping South African expats and Australian families navigate financial complexity. I provide practical advice to help you build the life you really want.
Six insights into how our lives are changing
I came across the HILDA Report recently and found it very interesting.
This is also one of the things I love about Australia, how readily available high-quality data is.
The HILDA Survey has followed the same Australians for over 20 years. These are not one-off polls. The survey tracks the same people through jobs, kids, divorces and retirements. It shows how life actually plays out over time, not just where things sit in a single year.
As a financial planner, I found it useful. As someone who moved here from South Africa, I found it clarifying. Some of it confirmed things I suspected. Some of it surprised me. Here are the findings I thought were worth sharing.
Fewer people are entering retirement as homeowners
Twenty years ago, around 75% of Australians retired owning their home outright. By 2023, that figure had fallen to 66%. Over the same period, the share of retirees renting privately doubled from 6% to 12%.
On the surface, that may not sound dramatic. But it matters.
Australia’s retirement system was built on a simple assumption. Most people would own their home by the time they stopped working. If you own your home, your income does not need to stretch as far. If you are renting, it does.
The report also highlights the gap that has opened up over time. House prices have risen by more than 400% over the past two decades. Wages have not kept pace. Not even close. For the average Australian, it now takes more than ten years of saving just to build a deposit.
If this trend continues, more people will spend their working lives renting. And many will carry that same reality into retirement.
Mortgage holders are now under more financial stress than renters
For a long time, renting was seen as the risky option. Own your home and you were on solid ground. Rent, and you were always one lease renewal away from trouble. That view is not wrong. I had to renew my own lease last month and caught myself thinking how disruptive it would be if the owner decided to sell.
But the data now tells the story from another angle.
In 2021, housing stress among mortgage holders was at an all-time low of 4.5%. By 2023, it had more than doubled to 10.3%, the highest level in more than a decade.
Housing stress is defined as spending more than 30% of your income on housing while being in the bottom 40% of earners. For years, mortgage holders experienced far lower levels of stress than renters. That gap has now closed. In some respects, it has reversed.
Recent modelling from the AIHW reinforces this shift. Almost 44.5% of households with a mortgage now spend more than 30% of their disposable income on housing. For renters, the figure is 28%.
From 2013 to 2021, renters were consistently more likely to be under housing stress. Since interest rates began rising in 2022, that pressure has moved. It now sits more heavily with mortgage holders.
Most people still assume that owning automatically puts you in a safer position. For many households right now, that assumption no longer holds.
Source: AIHW Housing Affordability Report 2025
Childcare costs have quietly doubled
In 2002, the median weekly spend on childcare was $72. By 2022, it had climbed to $191. That is in real terms, adjusted for inflation. The 2023 subsidy changes brought it back down to $171, but still, we are looking at a 140% increase over two decades.
What stands out to me is how the burden has shifted. In 2002, families in the lowest income bracket spent about 3.9% of their household income on childcare. By 2022, that had nearly doubled to 7.5%. The subsidy helped, but even now, lower income families are spending a bigger slice of their income on childcare than they were twenty years ago.
At the same time, more families are using paid care than ever before. In 2002, about 42% of families with kids under five used paid childcare. Now it is 56%. And the hours have gone up too.
For anyone who has had kids in care recently, none of this will come as a surprise. But seeing it tracked over twenty years makes the shift harder to ignore.
Grandparents are still a big part of the system, but that is changing
About half of all grandmothers and more than a third of grandfathers provide regular childcare. Among those with grandchildren under 15, the numbers are even higher: 59% of grandmothers and 43% of grandfathers.
That is a lot of unpaid care holding the system together.
But here is the interesting part. The proportion of grandparents providing care is actually declining. In 2007, 57% of grandmothers helped with childcare. By 2023, that had dropped to 47%. Grandfathers went from 48% to 36%.
A few things are driving this. People are becoming grandparents later. At age 60, only 43% now have grandchildren, compared to 60% in the earlier period. And more grandmothers are still working themselves, so they are less available.
For families with grandparents nearby, this still works. For expats or anyone without that support network, there is no release valve. You are paying full freight.
The super gap is closing, but it is still there
In 2015, the median super balance for women at retirement was about $91,000. For men, it was $216,000. Women were retiring with about 42% of what men had.
By 2023, women’s median balance had more than doubled to $191,000. Men’s grew too, but more slowly, to $310,000. The gap has narrowed. Women now retire with about 62% of what men do.
That is real progress. But men still retire with roughly 1.5 times the super that women do.
If you prefer to look at averages rather than medians, the picture is similar. In 2023, the average super balance at retirement was $383,000 for women and $504,000 for men.
The reasons are well documented. Women are more likely to work part-time and take career breaks for caring responsibilities amongst others. All of that compounds over a working life and shows up most clearly at the end of it.
Not everyone retires by choice
When you picture retirement, you probably imagine someone deciding they have had enough, financially secure, ready to move on. That is true for some people. But not for everyone.
Health is still the most common reason Australians give for retiring. In 2023, 29% said it was their main reason. That is down from 39% in 2003, but still the number one driver.
Job-related reasons come next. Somewhere between 20% and 30% of retirees in any given year say they left because of redundancy, employer pressure, or just being fed up with work. That is a big chunk of people who did not really choose to go.
Financial reasons, including super rules and pension eligibility, account for another 20% to 25%. And about one in five retirees say they left for family or lifestyle reasons.
The point is not that retirement is bad. It is that the path there is messier than we often assume. Some people step away on their own terms. Others get pushed.
Closing
I will leave the interpretation to you. But if there is one thread running through all of this, it is that the assumptions many of us grew up with are shifting. Housing is less secure. Childcare costs more. Retirement is less predictable.
The data does not tell us what to do about it. But it does make the picture clearer.
Sources
This article draws primarily on findings from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey Statistical Report 2025 (Waves 1–23).
The HILDA Survey: The 20th Annual Statistical Report of the HILDA Survey (2025). This report provides the long-term data on generational home ownership, the impact of parenthood, and the gender super gap.