Notwithstanding the privacy concerns last year’s Census raised, the periodic data dump delivered a range of useful insights into how society is changing, in terms of wealth, demographics and habits.
For financial planners, it offers a glimpse of the types of clients that are likely to start emerging and what their primary concerns will be. Data from last year shows, generally speaking, Australians are getting older, but not necessarily richer. Of course, there’s a significant variance by state and city.
Here are some take-outs from this week’s release of the national data.
A third of Aussies near retirement or retired
There are still more children than there are senior citizens, but the gap between the two cohorts – as a proportion of total population – is shrinking. One in 6 Australians (15.7 per cent) are now aged over 65, compared with 1 in 7 in 2011. Almost 1 in 5 (18.3 per cent) are in the pre-retiree 50-64 age bracket, which means super, pensions and estate planning will continue to be hot topics.
The states with the highest proportion of over 65s are Tasmania and South Australia, with 19.4 per cent and 18.3 per cent, respectively.
More mortgagees
The split between outright home owners, home owners with mortgages and renters is now fairly even, which is a stark change from 25 years ago, when outright home ownership was more common. In 1991, 41.1 per cent of Australians owned their home outright, compared with 31 per cent last year. Mortgages, meanwhile, were held by just over 1 in 4 Australians (27.5 per cent) in 1991 but are now held by more than a third (34.5 per cent) of Australian homeowners. Perth and Canberra had the most mortgage-holders as a proportion of dwellers, while Sydney had the least.
Mortgage stress – defined as spending more than a third of your income on the mortgage – now affects 1 in 4 Australians.
The median income rose $85 in five years
Across the country, the median personal income was $662 a week, up from $577 in 2011. The median salary in NSW was almost on par with the national average, at $664 a week.
There was significant regional divergence. In Canberra, the home of bureaucrats and politicians, the median salary was $1000, while at the other end of the spectrum, median Hobart wage was $637 a week.
