Nick Bruining has always taken a frank, no-nonsense approach to money, back when he started out in 1989 as a certified financial planner – he was Money Management’s Financial Planner of the Year in 2003 – and in his current life as a personal finance correspondent for the Seven Network and writer for The West Australian. He specialises in understanding the money worries and providing practical guidance to real people through his newspaper columns, on-air reports and his hit 2015 book Don’t Panic: Why You Don’t Need $1 Million To Retire Well. He says the myth that it’s impossible to retire on far less than $1 million is perpetuated by vested interests and that the truth is, a couple can retire on an income of $48,000 a year created from the Age Pension and just $270,000 in super. Nick qualified as an economist and is a former lecturer on financial planning at Curtin University. In between filing newspaper and TV financial reports and working on a recently released update of his book, which you can purchase here, Nick tries his luck catching crabs and lobsters in Perth’s Mandurah Estuary.