Retirees Who Spend From the Wrong Account First Run Out About Three Years Sooner. Here’s the Order That Adds Six Figures.
The sequence in which you pull from your retirement accounts matters far more than most retirees realize, and a common mistake made in the early years quietly shrinks a portfolio in ways that only become visible decades too late.
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This is only one modeled scenario, and the outcome is highly sensitive to the assumptions you plug in. Take a 65-year-old couple with $1.5 million split roughly a third each across a taxable brokerage, a traditional IRA, and a Roth. They spend about $78,535 a year, which is the average consumer expenditure, and they earn a 6% return with 2.5% inflation. Filing jointly in the 12% bracket, a naive withdrawal sequence can shorten portfolio longevity by about three years, while an optimized strategy preserves six figures of additional wealth over a 30-year retirement.
Change any of those inputs, the asset mix, the spending level, or the tax bracket, and both numbers shift significantly. A retiree with nearly everything concentrated in a single account type will see almost no impact at all.
That caveat matters because the common advice is a strict order. Taxable first, then tax-deferred money like traditional IRAs and 401(k)s is taxed as ordinary income on withdrawal, and Roth last. The logic makes sense at first glance. Tax-advantaged accounts get more years to compound, and taxable withdrawals often qualify for long-term capital gains rates, which are lower than ordinary income rates.
Why the Simple Order Backfires
Draining the brokerage first while the traditional IRA keeps growing sets up a bigger problem later. Required minimum distributions, the IRS-mandated annual withdrawals from tax-deferred accounts, now begin at age 73 for those born between 1951 and 1959, and age 75 for those born in 1960 or later. A larger IRA at 73 means a larger forced withdrawal, which can push a retiree from the 12% bracket into the 22% bracket, which starts at $100,800 for joint filers in 2026.
It can also trigger a Medicare surcharge. The income-related monthly adjustment amount, or IRMAA, uses a two-year lookback on modified adjusted gross income. In 2026, a joint filer crossing $218,000 pays an extra $81.20 per month on Part B, rising to $487 above $750,000, with Part D surcharges from $14.50 to $91 stacked on top. A single RMD spike can trip those cliffs.
Bracket Filling: The Better Answer
The more sophisticated approach uses the low-income window between retirement and age 73 to deliberately fill the lower brackets each year. That can mean pulling from the traditional IRA up to the top of the 12% band, or executing a Roth conversion (moving IRA money to Roth and paying tax now) to the same ceiling, while covering the rest of the spending from the brokerage. With the 2026 standard deduction of $32,200 for joint filers, a couple can realize meaningful income before any tax hits (we sized up that pre-RMD conversion window in detail in a free Roth guide).
Retirees in the 12% ordinary bracket also sit in the 0% long-term capital gains bracket, which is one of the most valuable and least used provisions in the code. Harvesting gains in the taxable account at 0% resets the cost basis for free.
Special Cases That Change the Order
Roth accounts have no RMDs for the original owner, allowing them to compound and pass to heirs income-tax-free. Qualified charitable distributions, available at age 70½ and capped at $111,000 per person in 2026, let a retiree satisfy an RMD by sending money directly to charity, keeping that sum entirely out of adjusted gross income and away from IRMAA calculations.
A large embedded gain in the brokerage account is often worth preserving rather than selling, because heirs receive a step-up in basis at death that wipes out the built-in capital gains tax. Meanwhile, a surviving spouse who transitions to single filing faces compressed brackets, where the 22% rate begins at just $50,400 in 2026. Front-loading Roth conversions while both spouses are alive protects the survivor from that future single-filer tax squeeze.
An Ordered Framework
- Cover baseline spending with Social Security and any pension. The 2027 COLA is tracking at 3.1%, based on one of the three Q3 months.
- Fill the 12% bracket with traditional IRA withdrawals or Roth conversions in the pre-RMD window.
- Take the rest from the taxable account, harvesting gains at 0% when eligible.
- Use QCDs after 70½ to blunt RMDs.
- Preserve Roth balances for late-life spending and heirs.
The right sequence is personal. It depends on account mix, spending, state tax, and health. Paying a fee-only planner to model it once and revisit it after any large market move or tax-law change is one of the highest-return decisions a retiree can make.
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David Beren has been a Flywheel Publishing contributor since 2022. Writing for 24/7 Wall St. since 2023, David loves to write about topics of all shapes and sizes. As a technology expert, David focuses heavily on consumer electronics brands, automobiles, and general technology. He has previously written for LifeWire, formerly About.com. As a part-time freelance writer, David’s “day job” has been working on and leading social media for multiple Fortune 100 brands. David loves the flexibility of this field and its ability to reach customers exactly where they like to spend their time. Additionally, David previously published his own blog, TmoNews.com, which reached 3 million readers in its first year. In addition to freelance and social media work, David loves to spend time with his family and children and relive the glory days of video game consoles by playing any retro game console he can get his hands on.
