You may be closer to retirement age than other members, and may need to access your retirement savings sooner.

This means that you do not have the luxury of a long time horizon during which you can remain invested in the Fund and recover from a fall in investment prices.

If you have six years or less to retirement, you can be confident that the Fund is designed to protect your retirement savings in a market downturn.

If you study the table above, you will see that from age 57 and upwards, your retirement savings in the Fund are gradually moved from the High Growth portfolio into a more conservative investment strategy, called the Stable portfolio.

This helps to protect your savings as you get closer to retirement, in the event that the investment markets experience negative investment returns.

In the table below, you will notice differences in the returns compared to the graph in the previous section, especially over the one-year period (2018).

This is because the Fund is designed to invest your money more conservatively as you approach retirement, protecting your investments from potential losses by giving up some of the higher returns possible when exposed to riskier investment markets.

As you near retirement, you do not have the time to wait for the investment cycle to turn and to reap the potentially more significant rewards. Therefore in 2018, the Fund’s investment strategy protected your retirement savings.

The graph above shows the returns you would have earned over different periods leading up to 31 December 2018, if you retired (you turned 63) in 2018. The returns are compared to inflation.