The Ten-Year Retirement Window

The five years before you stop working and the five years after contain a small number of decisions that shape the next twenty. This complimentary guide walks through what each one is, how the rules behind it actually work, and the specific question worth raising with your CPA, attorney, or advisor.

• 38%

  Of people aged 55 to 75 with $250,000 to $2 million in investable assets who already work with a financial professional still have no specific retirement income plan.

  Source ↓

• 21%

  Are confident their savings will support the lifestyle they want in retirement.

  Source ↓

• 86%

  Describe themselves as only somewhat informed, or not informed at all, about legislative changes affecting retirement.

  Source ↓

1. 01

   Decision 1:

   What your tax-deferred balance is actually worth, once the tax on it is counted

2. 02

   Decision 2:

   The gap years between your last paycheck and your first required distribution

3. 03

   Decision 3:

   The thresholds that sit outside the tax brackets and behave nothing like them

4. 04

   Decision 4:

   The order accounts are drawn down, and when the conventional order does not apply

5. 05

   Decision 5:

   Social Security framed as a tax question rather than a break-even calculation

6. 06

   Decision 6:

   Coverage between retirement and Medicare eligibility, and how income interacts with it

7. 07

   Decision 7:

   What happens when one position becomes too large a share of the plan

8. 08

   Decision 8:

   Why plans lose money in the seams between your CPA, your attorney, and your advisor

Some readers will find they are in good shape. That is a legitimate result and the guide says so.

Two of these overlap with decisions that have their own page, an old plan from a former employer is covered in the old 401(k) and IRA review, and what a current plan costs in the 401(k) fee review. For how the tax side is approached generally, see tax efficiency and wealth coordination.

A 2026 premium is determined by the 2024 tax return. Income earned at 63 sets the premium at 65. That is not a billing quirk. It is the reason this decade needs sequencing rather than urgency, because the planning window closes two years before the premium year rather than in it. Whatever shaped the figure below happened while nothing appeared to be happening at all.

The marker sits on the bottom rung deliberately. Most people reading this are below the first threshold today, and the band is not showing them where they are stuck. It is showing what the next two years of decisions can move them into, while those decisions are still in front of them. A Roth conversion, a lump-sum pension election, a large capital gain or a business sale all land in the same figure.

Two features catch people out. The tiers are cliffs, not slopes: one dollar over a threshold moves you into the whole next tier for the year. And the income measure counts tax-exempt interest, so municipal bonds bought precisely because the income is tax-free still count toward it.

There is a narrow appeal route, form SSA-44, for qualifying life-changing events, and retirement itself can qualify as work stoppage or reduction. A voluntary income event cannot. That is what makes this a sequencing problem rather than a paperwork one, the argument of this whole page, arriving with a number attached.

What this assumes ↓

If the decision in front of you is what to do with a specific employer plan rather than how to sequence the decade, that is a different page, see 401(a) rollover options, where the same tiers appear as a consequence of distribution mechanics rather than as a timing constraint.

Some employers make this decision more specific than others. If you are at Southern California Edison, which of two pension formulas applies to you was settled by where you stood on a date in 1999, see the SCE pension and cash balance guide.

Southern California Permanente Medical Group physicians chose a Keogh contribution level as Associates that stays fixed for the rest of their partnership, so the retirement date is decided around it. How that level, the 401(k) and the timing of withdrawals after leaving fit together is in the SCPMG Keogh and 401(k) guide.

Non-union salaried employees of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals have a date decision of their own: the salaried pension can start from 55 with 15 years of service, reduced for each year before 65, and it can be paid as a lump sum or as one of several annuities. When it can start and how it is paid is in the Kaiser Permanente salaried pension guide.

Long-tenured Nationwide associates hired before 2014 find that most of their pension cannot be taken as a lump sum at all, which moves the rollover decision onto the Savings Plan and makes the annuity form the real pension choice. Which formula applies and what the limits leave to decide is in the Nationwide pension and Savings Plan guide.

We have written plan-specific guides for nine employers, several of which turn on a decision that has to be made once and cannot be undone. If yours is among them, start with the employer benefit plan guides.