In you are in your later working years, you will probably be approaching, or even have reached, the peak of your ability to earn. It may also be a time when your financial commitments to your children come to end or you pay off a property, giving you some spare cash.
However, this is not the case for everyone. If you started your family later in life you may be juggling support for elderly parents as well minor children, or paying for young adults to study further.
It may even be a trying time of re-establishing yourself after a tough life event such as retrenchment, divorce or serious illness.
Whatever your family circumstances are, it is a good time to take stock of where you are in your financial journey and what you can change - especially if your earnings are strong - and while you still have some time until you retire.
Check your retirement plans
You should be giving your retirement plans a more careful eye, checking that you are on track to save enough to provide the income you need. To do this, you will also need to have some understanding of decisions you will need to make at retirement. Read more: How much do I need to save for retirement? and What are my choices at retirement?
If your savings are not where you would like them to be, now is the time to do something to ensure you can catch up as much as possible, especially if your financial commitments to your dependants end or decrease, or you pay off a home loan. Use our Budget planner to plan your spending more carefully and create space to save more for your retirement.
If you are contributing to an employer-sponsored retirement fund, find out if you can implement a voluntary increase on your contributions. Alternatively, you can start contributing to, or increase your contributions to, a retirement annuity. Read more: How do retirement annuities allow me to create my own retirement savings?
If you started saving late in life – or are only starting now - you may find that even on a tight budget you cannot contribute enough in time to have the income you want in retirement. Don’t give up! Whatever you save now will improve your situation later.
There are three fixes to the problem of not having enough to provide your desired income in retirement:
Shifting your retirement age to a later date gives you a triple-whammy effect. It lets you contribute for longer, allows you to enjoy more compounding interest on your savings and it reduces the number of years for which you will need an income in retirement. Read more: Why is compounding growth so important?
Invest in yourself
If you are working for an employer with a set retirement age that is earlier than the age you can afford to 
retire, give some thought to the skills you will need to continue working beyond your employer’s retirement age.
You may need to invest in yourself to acquire skills that will allow you to develop a working life that you enjoy enough to continue working beyond the average retirement age.
Financial advisers refer to the process of pivoting yourself to doing something different, but continuing to contribute to society, as rewirement.
Tackle debt
If you have debt, such as credit card debt or a home loan, focus on how you will pay it off before you retire or rewire – so that you are not burdened with debt repayments in that phase of your life. Paying off debt 
requires scaling back on your lifestyle costs. Or you could explore ways to earn extra money. Read more: What can I do if I have a debt problem? and use our Debt repayment calculator
If you are at, or nearly at, the top of your game in your career, you may have valuable skills you can use to earn an income as a side hustle and/or start building an alternate career, profession or business. You may even have hobbies from which you could earn an income.
Sandwiched
If you find yourself sandwiched between helping elderly parents, while still supporting your adult or near adult children, and your retirement funding is not on track, you may need to do some serious rethinking of your spending. You may need to put some rules in place about how much you can afford to spend on your dependants.
If you do not, you will repeat the cycle of financial dependence by becoming a financial burden to your children or other family members in your later years.
Review your cover
This is the time of life to review any life and disability cover you have – especially if it has been in place for some time. If you are beyond supporting dependants, do you still need all the cover you have in place, and 
are you still getting value for your spend? Read more: How much life cover do I need? and How much lump sum disability cover do I need?
Your key risks may well have changed with your stage of life – your need for life cover and disability cover based on your occupation, may now be lower as you are closer to retirement. As you age, however, the likelihood of suffering disabling conditions and severe illnesses increases dramatically.
It is best to take out cover when you are young, but if your risks are not adequately protected, the second best time to take out cover is now. Read more: When will a disability policy pay out? and What is severe illness cover?
Check your will and estate plan
At this stage of life, you should definitely not be without a will or an estate plan. Estate planning should ideally begin before you create wealth through investments and property, but no matter where you are in 
building up wealth, you should work out exactly what will happen should you die tomorrow. Not planning what will happen to your home, your investments and any minor children, means your family inherits a nightmare. Read more: Why a will is important and why should I make one?
If they do not already know, now is the time to make sure your family knows where your will is. If is also a good time, to draw up a list of all your assets and ensure that there will be enough cash in your estate to meet all your bills, including any high-cost last-days healthcare costs and the taxes due on death.
If you are feeling despondent about your financial affairs, partner with a professional adviser or a money coach who can help you. There will always be a plan that can improve your financial life. Read more: How can I find a good financial adviser?
Remember, however, that planning for a better financial future does not mean finding a get-rich-quick scheme. Do not fall prey to those who promise to fix things for you quickly with returns that are unrealistic or involve huge risk, and may even be illegal or a scam. Doing so is only likely to see you become one of the many victims of these schemes, and ending up much worse off than you were before.
