Retirement Planning

Retirement is two jobs in one.

The first job is building the pile. The second job is turning that pile into a paycheck that lasts the rest of your life. Between them sits a transition window of roughly five years on either side of your retirement date, and that window is where most plans either come together or quietly fall apart. We help families in Wesley Chapel and the broader Tampa Bay area treat retirement as the multi-phase project it actually is.

What this covers

A few terms come up in almost every retirement conversation, and being fluent in them changes the quality of the decisions you make.

• Catch-up contributions. Extra room in your 401(k) or IRA once you hit age 50, with an even larger window for ages 60 to 63 under SECURE 2.0.
• Roth conversion. Moving money from a traditional (pre-tax) IRA to a Roth IRA, paying tax now in exchange for tax-free growth and withdrawals later.
• Required Minimum Distribution (RMD). The amount the IRS forces you to withdraw each year from tax-deferred accounts starting at age 73 (rising to 75 in 2033).
• Sequence-of-returns risk. The risk that a poor market early in retirement, combined with withdrawals, permanently impairs your portfolio even if average long-term returns are fine.
• Safe withdrawal rate. A planning rule of thumb (often anchored around 4%) for the share of a portfolio you can draw down annually with reasonable confidence of lasting 30 years.
• Social Security full retirement age (FRA). The age at which you receive 100% of your earned benefit. For most people retiring now, that’s 67. Claiming earlier reduces it; waiting until 70 increases it.

Why it matters for Florida retirees

Florida sits in a sweet spot. There’s no state income tax on Social Security, pensions, IRA withdrawals, or 401(k) distributions, which changes the math on Roth conversions and withdrawal sequencing compared to a high-tax state. The weather and tax climate keep drawing retirees in, which also means more competition for housing, healthcare appointments, and quality long-term care facilities.

A few 2026 numbers worth anchoring on:

• Social Security benefits rose 2.8% in January 2026 under the latest COLA, adding roughly $56 per month to the average retired-worker benefit.
• The standard Medicare Part B premium jumped to $202.90 per month, an unusually large increase that eats up a meaningful share of that COLA for many retirees.
• Tampa-area healthcare and home-insurance costs continue to run above the national average, so any retirement income plan built here needs a real line item for both.

The financial pyramid we work from

A solid plan is built in layers, from the ground up. Skip a layer and the layers above start to wobble.

1. Income Protection. Term insurance, disability coverage, an emergency reserve, and the right beneficiary structure. The “if life doesn’t go as planned” layer.
2. Income Accumulation. 401(k), IRA, Roth, taxable brokerage, HSA. The “growing the pile” layer, optimized for tax treatment and time horizon.
3. Income Distribution. Turning the pile into a paycheck that lasts. Sequencing, Social Security timing, Medicare and IRMAA, and the long-term care contingency.

When all three layers are coordinated, every decision in one supports the others.

How we plan it

Good retirement planning is less about picking products and more about sequencing decisions in the right order. The work usually looks like this:

• Gap analysis. What you’ll likely spend, what guaranteed sources (Social Security, pensions) will cover, and the gap your portfolio has to fill.
• Contribution strategy. Which accounts to fund, in what order, including employer match, HSA, Roth versus traditional, and catch-up room.
• Asset location. Putting the right assets in the right tax wrappers so growth happens where it’s taxed least.
• Withdrawal-sequence design. A drawdown plan that coordinates taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth accounts to minimize lifetime tax, not just this year’s tax.
• Social Security timing. Modeling claiming ages for both spouses, including survivor implications.
• Healthcare and long-term care budget. A realistic reserve for Medicare premiums, IRMAA brackets, supplemental coverage, and the LTC scenario most families would rather not think about.

We coordinate this work with your tax planning and estate planning so the three plans don’t pull in different directions.

When to start

There’s no single right age, but there are leverage windows.

• Ages 25 to 45. Pure accumulation. Capture the match, automate increases, and let compounding do most of the heavy lifting.
• Five to fifteen years from retirement. The highest-leverage planning window. Catch-up contributions, Roth conversion strategy, asset location, and rebalancing decisions made here compound for decades.
• The retirement year itself. Final claiming decisions, rollover choices, healthcare enrollment, and the first year of the withdrawal plan.
• Post-retirement reviews. At least annual, because RMD ages, tax law, and your own spending patterns will shift.

Common retirement-planning mistakes

A handful of preventable mistakes show up over and over.

• Claiming Social Security at 62 without modeling the alternative. For many households, waiting even a few years materially changes lifetime benefits and survivor income.
• Ignoring the Roth conversion window. The years between retirement and RMD age are often the lowest-tax years of a person’s life. Skipping conversions during that window can hand the IRS a much larger bill later.

- **No real plan for long-term care.** Hoping it won't happen is not a plan, and Medicare does not pay for custodial care. - **Withdrawing from the wrong account first.** Reflexively pulling from taxable accounts, or reflexively pulling from the IRA, without a sequencing plan tends to leave money on the table over a 25-to-30-year retirement.

If any of this is on your mind, we’d rather have the conversation early than try to fix it after the fact.