The countdown is on. Christmas is coming, and tucked in between the prawns, the cricket and the long lunches is something we rarely make room for: time.

Time to slow down and talk about life in a way most of us simply cannot manage during the year. And if you’re somewhere in your 50s or 60s, this is also one of the best chances you’ll get to talk about retirement. Not the formal version with paperwork and calculators, but the real version that begins with simple, honest conversations about how you want to live.

Before anyone gets hoodwinked into believing retirement planning begins with investments or spreadsheets, it helps to say plainly that it doesn’t start with numbers at all. It starts with conversations, and often a negotiation about life, then money.

Christmas is one of the few times when couples and families are relaxed enough to lift their eyes from the day to day and talk honestly about what the future might look like.

These conversations shape everything that follows and they protect you from being steered into products or strategies that don’t fit the life you want. Once you’ve discussed the life you want, the financial decisions become much clearer and far easier to step through.

The most useful way to approach these conversations over Christmas is to group them in ways that feel natural. Start with identity, move into relationships and family, and only then shift to money.

Start with the personal conversations

Christmas gives you something rare: the mental space to ask yourself what you actually want from the next decade or two of your life. This begins with a quiet internal conversation. What kind of life do you want to create now?

What do you want more of, and what are you ready to let go of? How do you want your health, work, time and relationships to feel? This forms the foundation for everything else because without it, the financial decisions sit on shaky ground.

Once you’ve done that internal work, it becomes much easier to speak with your partner about what retirement might look like, how to time it and what lifestyle you both imagine.

Timing is about understanding your energy, your readiness to make change and whether the shift happens together or at different stages. Lifestyle is simply about how you want to live once you have more control over your days.

Christmas gives you the ideal moment to ask whether your current home still fits the life you want.

Christmas gives you the rare gap in working to talk about how you each see the next few years unfolding, what you want your ordinary weeks to look like, and where your hopes and expectations overlap.

Start small: what does an ordinary Tuesday look like in the life you want. What does the first adventure look like? Once you can picture these, the bigger decisions become far easier.

Move into the relationship and family conversations

Once you’ve formed a shared vision, the next set of conversations widens to the people around you. This is where the realities of ageing parents and nearly adult children come into sharper focus.

Christmas often puts both ends of the family spectrum in front of you. You might notice small but important changes in your parents’ mobility, memory or confidence, while at the same time watching your children move towards independence, new jobs or their first financial commitments.

These observations don’t need to turn into formal discussions at the table, but they are worth acknowledging privately. What support might your parents need in the coming years and what boundaries are realistic.

How would this shape your own retirement plans? And what kind of support is reasonable to offer your children as they step forward? Some will be preparing to move out; others will be saving for a deposit. These changes can shift your cost of living and financial flexibility more than people expect.

These conversations sit naturally together because they all influence your retirement. Christmas can allow you the space to notice what’s changing and make a few practical plans with a clearer head. It is also a reminder that retirement isn’t something you do alone; the people around you shape it, too.

Explore the question of work and purpose

Once the personal, relationship and family pieces are on the table, the conversation often turns to work. This is the time to talk about what role you want work to play in the next part of your life. Do you want to step back, shift to something lighter, pursue a second-act career or build a more flexible portfolio of income and interests?

With distance from your inbox, you get a sharper sense of what you’re tired of and what still energises you. These conversations help shape both your next steps and your financial plans for the year ahead.

Talk about the role of home

Before you start talking about money, it helps to talk about where you want to live. Your home shapes your daily life, your sense of community and your long-term wellbeing, and it usually ties up a large share of your wealth.

Christmas gives you the ideal moment to ask whether your current home still fits the life you want. Do you imagine living here through your 60s and 70s? Is it the right size, the right location, tying up the appropriate amount of money and costing the right amount to maintain?

Would staying put help you live the life you’ve discussed, or would another place make more sense, and at what stage? Could you unlock some of the capital tied up in your home to live better?

You don’t need answers now, but you do need the conversation. It helps you understand whether your home will play a role in your retirement plan or simply remain the place you enjoy for as long as it works.

Bring the money into focus

Once you’ve talked about life, work, family and home, the financial conversation becomes much easier. The numbers start to make sense. You can see your financial world as a series of decisions you can act on instead of a jumble of accounts you hope will sort themselves out (or ignore).

Start with the basics. Look at your spending and the big commitments ahead. Make a simple budget for what you want to spend and save. Open your super statement and understand what you have, what you’re invested in, what you pay in fees and whether the fund is performing well. Also consider whether your fund delivers strong pre-retirement and retirement support, or is focused mainly on accumulation.

Think about whether you might be eligible for the age pension and when. Simply knowing this gives you more freedom. Review your investments, your contributions and the pathway that gets you to “enough”. Then think about timing: when your income will shift from earned income to investment income and the pension.

With that knowledge, consider how long you want to keep working and what financial reality supports the lifestyle you’ve mapped out. From here, the rest falls into place. You can adjust your contributions, refine your spending, demolish any lingering debt or recognise that you’re already on track and cheer quietly.

None of this needs to be heavy. These are simply the practical conversations that follow naturally once you’ve discussed the bigger picture of how you want to live.

Look beyond the pay cheque

This time of year gives you enough distance from your work rhythm to ask one of the most revealing questions in retirement planning: what would you do with your days if the size of your pay cheque wasn’t the main driver?

Most people never stop long enough to ask this, yet it’s one of the clearest indicators of what the next chapter could look like. And if you come up blank, that’s not a failure. It simply becomes your project for the year ahead.

You might still want to work, but do it differently. Something lighter, more flexible or more meaningful. You might picture a mix of part-time work, volunteering, study, creative projects or giving long-ignored interests space to grow. Or you may realise you want a period of rest before the next stage begins.

This question shifts the focus from what you’re leaving to what you’re moving toward. And once you can picture the kind of days you want, the financial and logistical decisions to support them become far easier.

Overall, none of these conversations need to be formal or perfect; they just need space to begin. Christmas often gives you that space.

This is my last column for the year, and I hope I’ve encouraged you to question old assumptions about retirement and make it a more personal, less rigid path. Until 2026 – talk about how you can make your retirement epic! You know you want to!

Bec Wilson is author of the bestseller How to Have an Epic Retirement and the newly released Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. She writes a weekly newsletter at epicretirement.net and hosts the Prime Time podcast.

• Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that considers their own personal circumstances before making financial decisions.

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