Hi Jan,
Happy Valentine’s Day!
While retirement tax planning may not sound especially romantic, it is very much about alignment and coordination. The decisions that feel small in a single year can have meaningful consequences over decades, and understanding those tradeoffs is one of the most caring things you can do for your future self and for those you share your life with.
This week’s article and podcast episode both focus on how tax planning works best when viewed as a long term coordination problem rather than a collection of isolated rules. By stepping back and looking at how income layers interact, it becomes easier to make decisions that support spending, flexibility, and legacy goals over time.
| | | | Retirement Tax Planning Is About Managing Tradeoffs, Not Following Rules Retirement tax planning is often presented as a set of rules. These rules are usually designed to work in isolation or within a single tax year, which makes them appealing but incomplete. While these guidelines can be helpful starting points, they are not finished solutions. Real-life tax planning decisions are more complex because they involve interacting tradeoffs that unfold over decades rather than a single tax year.
By Retirement Researcher | | | | Tax planning in retirement is less about chasing the lowest possible tax bill in any single year and more about balancing what you pay now against what you’ll likely owe later. The real challenge is to manage your income in a way that maximizes after-tax spending power over the course of your retirement, while avoiding unnecessary surprises from the tax code along the way.
By McLean Asset Management
| | | | YouTube: Tax Planning for Retirement in 2026 Replay Taxes play a major role in how much of your retirement savings you actually get to spend. In this session, you’ll learn how tax maps can help you make smarter decisions about Roth conversions and long-term capital gains harvesting, especially in light of new tax legislation enacted in July 2025. This will guide your understanding of the content in Chapter 10 of the Retirement Planning Guidebook.
| | | | Are You Paying More in Retirement Taxes Than You Should?
In this episode of Retire With Style, Wade Pfau and Alex Murguia answer follow up questions from the recent tax planning webinar. They discuss effective marginal tax rates, preferential income stacking, Roth conversion tradeoffs, and how blending distributions across account types can improve after tax outcomes. The episode highlights why tax planning decisions rarely operate in isolation and why coordination across years often matters more than minimizing taxes in any single year.
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