Which account you draw from first
Taxable, tax-deferred, or Roth. The order changes your lifetime tax bill materially, and the right answer moves as your income and the brackets do.
Retirement planning
Turning what you saved into a paycheck that keeps arriving
Accumulating was the straightforward part. Distribution is where the decisions get harder, less reversible, and considerably more expensive to get wrong.
The decisions that matter most
Most of these have a window. Several close before most people know they were open.
When to claim Social Security
Claiming early, at full retirement age, or at seventy is a different decision for each spouse, and the survivor benefit usually matters more than the monthly figure people compare.
What happens to the income if one of you dies
A household loses a Social Security check, may lose a pension, and files single the following year at compressed brackets. This is the scenario most plans never model.
What healthcare actually costs
Medicare premiums, supplements, and the IRMAA thresholds that raise them based on income from two years earlier.
Income
Guaranteed, or market-dependent
Nearly every retirement income question comes down to how much of your spending depends on markets behaving.
Guaranteed income
The money that shows up whether or not the market cooperates. Social Security, a pension if you have one, and anything else you hold that pays for life.
Market-dependent income
Withdrawals from invested accounts. Higher expected return, and exposed to sequence risk: the same average return in a different order produces a very different outcome.
The question in between
How much of your essential spending should be covered by income that cannot fall. Once that floor is set, the rest of the portfolio can be invested for growth without it keeping you awake.
Tax in retirement
Retirement is the one stretch of life where you have real control over your taxable income, because you largely choose where it comes from. That control has an expiry date: required minimum distributions, and the year a surviving spouse starts filing single.
The planning worth doing happens in the gap between retiring and those dates. Roth conversions, harvesting into low brackets, and staying underneath the IRMAA thresholds are all decisions made years before the return that reveals them.
Long-term care
The largest uninsured number most retired households carry. The question that matters is not whether you could afford care. It is what happens to the spouse still living at home while it is being paid for.
There are several ways to handle it, including deciding deliberately to self-fund. All of them are better than arriving at it without having done the arithmetic.
If you want a quick read on where your own plan is thin, the Storehouse Test takes about ninety seconds.
Common questions
When should I claim Social Security?
For a married couple the higher earner is not really choosing their own benefit, they are setting what the surviving spouse lives on. That, and the effect on your taxable income, usually matter more than the break-even age most calculators compute.
Which account should I draw from first?
Taxable, tax-deferred or Roth, and the order changes your lifetime tax bill materially. The right answer moves as your income and the brackets do, so it is a decision made more than once rather than settled at retirement.
What is IRMAA?
An income-related surcharge on Medicare premiums, calculated from your income two years earlier. It works as a series of steps, so crossing a threshold by a single dollar costs the whole step.
Start with a conversation
Bring the question that is actually bothering you. We will tell you plainly whether it is one we can help with, and if it is not, who can.