The last 10 years before retirement can feel a little like approaching a major intersection: The road ahead is visible, but the decisions you make now can determine which direction your retirement ultimately takes.
Up until now, your focus may have been primarily on accumulating assets during earlier stages of your career. Now, the years leading up to retirement often require a shift toward coordination, strategy, and preparing for how your money will actually support you.
This is the moment when financial planning often becomes more complex - but also more valuable.
Your Peak Earning Years May Be Coming to an End
Many people enter their final working decade at or near their highest earning level.
This can create opportunities to accelerate retirement savings, pay down debt, build cash reserves, and strengthen overall financial security. It may also be one of the last chances to take full advantage of workplace retirement plans, catch-up contributions, and other tax-advantaged savings opportunities.
At the same time, higher income can bring new planning challenges.
You may be balancing retirement savings while helping children with college expenses, supporting aging parents, managing a mortgage, or navigating complex tax situations. The decisions become less about just saving and more about directing resources strategically. The goal shifts from accumulation alone to making intentional choices that align with both your current responsibilities and your long-term retirement goals.
It's not just about how much you're saving; it's about making sure your resources are working in the places where they can have the greatest impact.
Taxes Become More Important
As retirement gets closer, tax planning often becomes a bigger part of the conversation. You might be asking…
- Should you increase contributions to traditional retirement accounts or Roth accounts?
- Would Roth conversions make sense before required minimum distributions begin?
- How will Social Security affect your taxable income?
- What happens when pension income, retirement account withdrawals, and investment income all start working together?
Planning ahead may create opportunities to manage future tax liability while giving you more flexibility later. The years leading up to retirement often provide a unique window to evaluate how different accounts, income sources, and withdrawal strategies may affect your taxes over time. And while no one can predict future tax laws, proactive planning may help create more options and allow you to make decisions on your own timeline rather than being forced into them by required distributions or changing circumstances.
Healthcare Planning Takes Center Stage
Healthcare is one of the most underestimated retirement expenses, and it becomes much harder to ignore as you near retirement. In fact, AARP reports that a 65-year-old can expect to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on healthcare during retirement (depending on several different factors).
Medicare timing also matters. CMS says the standard monthly Part B premium for 2026 is $202.90, which is a concrete reminder that even “basic” healthcare coverage has a real price tag.
For people retiring before 65, the healthcare gap can be especially important; early retirees may need to bridge coverage with COBRA or ACA marketplace coverage until Medicare begins. That makes healthcare planning one of the first retirement questions to answer, not one to leave until the end.
The bottom line is that healthcare planning is about more than estimating expenses. It's about understanding how potential healthcare costs fit into your overall retirement strategy.
Risk Management Becomes More Important
As retirement approaches, protecting what you've built often becomes just as important as continuing to grow it.
That doesn't necessarily mean becoming overly conservative. However, it does mean understanding how market volatility, inflation, healthcare expenses, and unexpected life events could affect your retirement plan.
The final decade before retirement is often a good time to review:
- Investment allocation
- Emergency reserves
- Insurance coverage
- Estate planning documents
- Beneficiary designations
- Long-term care considerations
Taking a fresh look at these areas before retirement can help you adjust while you still have flexibility and earning power.
Why Coordination Matters
The challenge in the decade leading up to retirement is that none of these decisions happens in isolation. Taxes affect income planning. Healthcare decisions affect cash flow. Investment strategies affect withdrawal plans. Estate planning impacts beneficiaries and legacy goals.
In other words, the closer retirement gets, the more interconnected these decisions become.
The 10 years before retirement are when financial decisions begin carrying greater long-term consequences, but it's also when thoughtful planning can create significant opportunities. If you’re in this window, now is the time to make sure your investments, tax strategy, retirement income plan, and long-term goals are working together. We're here to help you coordinate investments, taxes, retirement income, and long-term goals into a strategy designed for the next chapter of life. Click here to schedule an appointment.