Neil Fenning | Sep 15 2026 13:00
Most people treat the last ten years of work as a countdown. The date gets closer, the balance goes up, and the plan stays roughly where it was.
We would argue those ten years are the most useful planning window you will ever have, and for a specific reason. It is the last stretch where you still have earned income, contribution capacity, and time on your side all at once. Decisions made here tend to widen the range of choices available later, which is a different goal than simply saving more.
At A5 Financial, this is where we spend a great deal of our time with clients in their 50s and early 60s across Bothell, Bellevue, Kirkland, and greater Seattle. What follows is a general framework, and the right sequence for any individual household depends on income, taxes, timeline, and how much uncertainty feels tolerable.
Define the timeline before you optimize anything
"When can I retire?" is usually treated as a single question with a single answer. It is more useful as a comparison.
Take three candidate ages and describe what each one actually requires. Retiring earlier generally means a longer stretch to fund, more years before Social Security and Medicare are available, and a larger reliance on your own assets. Retiring later means fewer years to fund, more time to contribute, and a higher Social Security benefit if you delay claiming, alongside the reality that health and family circumstances don't always cooperate with a plan.
Each version carries assumptions about lifestyle, health care, family obligations, and whether you want to stop working entirely or shift to something part-time. Writing those assumptions down is what turns a vague target into something you can test.
Stress-test the income, not just the balance
A retirement balance tells you what you have. It does not tell you whether it works.
The more useful exercise is to estimate two spending figures separately. Essential expenses cover housing, insurance, health care, food, transportation, and taxes. Discretionary spending covers travel, gifts, hobbies, and the things that make retirement feel like something other than a longer weekend.
Then map where the money will come from, including Social Security, any pension, cash reserves, taxable investments, tax-deferred accounts, Roth assets, and in some cases insurance-based income sources. The question that matters is whether reliable income covers the essential number, and what has to happen if it doesn't.
Social Security timing belongs in this analysis rather than after it. Claiming can begin as early as 62 and delaying past full retirement age increases the monthly benefit up to age 70, and the choice interacts with your health, your spouse's benefit, and how much you need from the portfolio in the early years.
Review how your accounts are structured
Two households can hold identical amounts and face very different retirements, depending on where the money sits.
Tax-deferred accounts like a traditional 401(k) or IRA produce ordinary income when withdrawn. Roth accounts generally produce tax-free withdrawals once requirements are met. Taxable brokerage accounts have their own treatment and their own flexibility. Cash reserves do a job none of the others can do, which is funding an unexpected expense without forcing a sale.
The mix across those categories is what determines how much control you have over your taxable income in any given retirement year. Building some balance across them while you are still working is considerably easier than manufacturing it afterward.
This is also the moment to look honestly at concentration risk. Employer stock, a legacy position you have held for decades, or a sector-heavy 401(k) lineup can all leave a portfolio more exposed than intended right when the timeline for recovery is shortening.
Coordinate taxes and withdrawal sequencing
The order in which you draw from your accounts can affect your lifetime tax bill, and the planning for that happens before retirement rather than during it.
One of the most useful windows opens after you stop working and before required minimum distributions begin. RMDs generally start at age 73 for people born between 1951 and 1959, and at age 75 for those born in 1960 or later, which means many people approaching retirement now have a longer low-income window than they realize. Converting a portion of tax-deferred savings to Roth during those years can mean paying tax at a lower rate than the rate that may apply once RMDs and Social Security are both running.
Whether that is a good idea, and how much to convert in any year, depends on your bracket, your projected future income, and thresholds like the Medicare IRMAA surcharge, which is calculated using income from two years prior. Washington residents have an added consideration, because the state has no income tax but does apply a capital gains tax to higher earners, which can matter when large positions are being unwound.
These decisions coordinate best with your CPA or tax professional involved, and we work alongside them rather than around them.
Prepare for what the plan can't predict
A plan that only works in a good decade isn't much of a plan. The last ten years of work are the right time to look directly at the uncomfortable variables.
Market volatility matters most in the years immediately around your retirement date, because withdrawals taken during a decline can do lasting damage. Longevity cuts the other way, since a plan built for 20 years and used for 35 has a different problem entirely. Family needs arrive without notice, whether that is an aging parent or an adult child. And the possibility of working longer, or part-time, is a legitimate part of the plan rather than an admission of failure.
Our income ladder approach is built around the first of those risks specifically, holding several years of expected income in principal-protected instruments so that near-term needs are not dependent on what the market does in a given quarter. That structure does not eliminate risk, and no strategy can, but it does change which risks reach your monthly income.
Ten years out versus one year out
The difference between starting this work early and starting it late is rarely about the total saved. It shows up in the number of options available.
A household that begins ten years out has time to build balance across account types, to convert some savings to Roth across multiple low-income years, to reduce a concentrated stock position gradually rather than all at once, and to adjust the retirement date based on what the modeling shows rather than what they hoped.
A household that starts in the final year still has choices, and most of them are narrower. The math is what it is by then, and the main remaining levers are spending and timing.
Neither situation determines an outcome. But options tend to be more valuable than optimization, and options are what this decade produces.
How we can help
Our Retirement Readiness Review is built for exactly this stage, and it works through your income, expenses, Social Security timing, health care costs, tax exposure, and equity compensation to give you a specific answer rather than a range. Some clients learn they can retire earlier than they assumed. Others learn what needs to change in the next few years. Either way, the uncertainty gets resolved.
Learn more about our work with pre-retirees here.
