Ahhhh, taxes — a necessary evil in our American lives. They pay for roads, safety and a whole host of other community-related services. We enjoy the benefits our taxes pay for but loathe the idea of paying more than our fair share. Taxes leave our pockets with that less-than-full feeling after Uncle Sam takes his cut. Taxes follow you even into retirement. Those retirement accounts you’ve started drawing from, Social Security benefits you’re receiving and other income from accounts designed to support your lifestyle in retirement may be taxable.
For most of your working life, you’ve been in an accumulation phase — gathering and growing assets to be used to support you in your later years. During retirement, however, you move to a different mindset as you transition into a distribution phase. Planning for the distribution phase includes a shift in perspective as you work toward preserving the assets you spent so many years building.
One of the keys to preserving your assets is to develop an appropriate distribution strategy, one that accounts for many things — including the taxes you’ll owe in retirement — and answers key questions: When should I start taking income from my accounts? Which accounts should I take the income from? A distribution strategy is designed to create a plan for optimizing your tax liability and your income — and maintaining that income for as long as you will need it.
Even if you’ve already entered retirement, you can still benefit from distribution planning and potential repositioning of assets to help ensure your strategy is as tax efficient as possible. While distribution planning would start before retirement in an ideal world, people who have already entered retirement can also greatly benefit from building a
distribution strategy to potentially pay less in future taxes. But where do you begin?
What steps do you need to take today to help ensure financial confidence
tomorrow? An experienced financial professional can help you develop a tax-efficient approach designed to preserve your retirement assets, whether you’re already retired or you plan to work 10 more years.
