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6 Common Tax Mistakes Most Retirees Make (And How to Avoid Them) · Retirement Answers

• 0:00
  Jacob: Having no plan for taxes in retirement could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the rest of your life. In fact, every decision you make around your retirement plan comes back to taxes in some way. So in today's episode, I'm sharing six tax mistakes that almost every retiree makes and how you can avoid them. Hey, friends. My name is Jacob Duke, and I'm your host here as always, and also the owner of a retirement planning firm where we help people just like you plan smarter so you can live better in retirement.
• 0:26
  If you're a new listener, welcome. I'm glad to have you here, and I hope the information that's shared today is valuable and applicable to your situation. For all those who are frequent listeners, thank you so much. I enjoy jumping in and getting to speak with you each and every week. Now, I have a couple quick announcements for you.
• 0:41
  If you haven't already, I invite you over to my YouTube channel to see more in-depth case studies and different content there that's perhaps easier to consume visually and maybe more helpful in that way. I'll have my channel linked down in the show notes of this podcast episode. Also, if you're enjoying the podcast, I encourage you to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps me out more than you know, because when you do that, it tells the algorithm to share this podcast with more people and then they can benefit from these same tips and strategies just like you. Thanks in advance for doing that.
• 1:09
  Let's go ahead and jump into these six tax planning mistakes that you should avoid. Alright, the first mistake is pulling from the wrong accounts at the wrong times. So, whenever you're trying to build out an income plan, you've got to understand what types of assets you have, whether it be tax deferred, tax free or taxable. You also need to know how much you have in those different account types, because that could dictate whether or not you need to do some other strategies, whether it be Roth conversions, which we'll talk about here in just a moment, or maybe tax gain harvesting. Again, we'll talk about this in just a moment.
• 1:37
  But whenever you go into retirement, you can't just go in and say, I'm going to take a little bit from here, a little bit from here, a little bit from here. Now, that might end up being the correct strategy, but you need to know why that's the correct strategy. If you don't have a plan for this, you could end up taking from the wrong accounts early on in retirement, forcing you to take more out of the wrong accounts later in retirement. So here's a hypothetical for you, just maybe kind of play this out just a little bit. Let's say that you have a million dollars in a traditional IRA, you've got about $200,000 in cash or brokerage, and you got about $100,000 in a Roth.
• 2:06
  You also need about $80,000 for spending, you're married, you're both 62, and you both plan on taking your Social Security at 67. So that's a, I don't know, maybe a base scenario or a common starting place for a lot of people who are thinking about retirement. So the question goes back to you're both 62, you're not going take your Social Security benefits until 67. At that point, though, that would create about $50,000 of income for yourselves. And if we think back to what I just mentioned, we need about $80,000 a year to live on.
• 2:32
  So we've got five years from 62 until 67 that we don't have any income coming in. We don't have a pension. We don't have any Social Security because we're not turning that on till '67. So we've got $80,000 a year of expenses that we have to take care of, right, and pull money from out of our portfolio to meet our needs there. So five years worth of that is about $400,000 that you've got to create until you get to 67, at which point again, your Social Security would be flipping on and less money would be needed from your portfolio.
• 3:00
  So where do you take that $80,000 from every single year? Some would say, hey, just take it all from your tax deferred account, let your cash keep going, let your Roth IRA keep growing, and then you would just pull from your traditional IRA. And that might be the right answer, but we have to consider your different tax brackets. Here in 2025, The standard deduction for married filing jointly is going be $30,000. So that's $30,000 of tax free money that you can take out of your IRA.
• 3:24
  Also, first 10% bracket of this tax brackets there is going to be $23,800. So you have about fifth we'll round up. We'll call it $54,000 of room, all less than 10%. So the first 30 again is tax free. The next 23,000 will round up to 24.
• 3:41
  That is going to be taxed at 10%. So in this example, this couple could pull $54,000 out of their IRA to meet that portion of their $80,000 of income need. They can pull that much out and only pay about $2,400 in taxes, which I don't have a calculator in front of me, that would be a really low effective tax rate on $54,000 Now, question their mind should be now is, do we take the additional $26,000 we need from our traditional IRA and pay 12% federal tax rate on that, or do we need to pull that $26,000 from our cash? Would that be more beneficial and stay below the 12% rate and pay at most 10% on any dollar that comes out of our IRA? Now, that's that's one example there.
• 4:21
  Right? Let's say they didn't do that. Let's say they did this incorrectly. Let's say they pull all $80,000 out of their cash and their Roth IRA first. They got 300,000 total between those two things.
• 4:32
  And if they did this, they would come up a little short, they would make it all the way to 67, but let's say they can get all the way to 66 on on that $300,000 worth of income there to meet about $80,000 of income need every year. What they would do is they would wind down and spend down all their cash and all their Roth IRA, but then their traditional IRA would actually continue growing, and it actually continue compounding so that whenever they do get to 67, whenever their Social Security turns on, what would happen there is is they would then have only one source of income to pull from, which is a taxable source. Right? So every dollar they take out of IRA at that point would become taxable, which would also make their Social Security at least in part probably taxable as well. And we're going to dive into Social Security tax issues here in just a moment in number four.
• 5:12
  So stay tuned for that. But what they've done there is they've spent the wrong accounts too soon, which leads to more tax on Social Security in the future, more tax on their IRA distributions in the future, and then also potentially more tax once they get to RMDs and really large RMDs because they haven't spent down their IRA appropriately. So this shows you maybe that the timing of where you take money from and how you combine your income from these different sources that you might have available to you, that's crucial because you can pay less tax now, but also still less tax in the future because just because you have to take money out of an IRA doesn't mean that any of it's gonna be taxable, especially if Social Security is your only form of other income. So there's ways to take money out of your IRA completely tax free because of how the tax code works and how all the calculations around Social Security taxes are done. So if you want learn more about that, again, head over to my YouTube channel, I have a video that I put out recently that shares this in more detail and kind of walks you through it visually, it might be helpful for you if you want to learn more about that.
• 6:04
  But that's number one, I see all the time people pulling from the wrong accounts at the wrong times, following different rules of thumb that might be accurate in some instances, but maybe not the right thing for them specifically. The second mistake that I often see is around Roth conversions, and there's actually two mistakes here. The first one is converting when you shouldn't be converting, and the second one is not converting when you should be. What I found here is that Roth conversions are a very hot topic, and they're fun for everybody. They're cool.
• 6:29
  They're the only tax planning thing you can do for retirees, that's just simply not true. I'm walking through six different ones here that are crucial to your tax plan, but Roth conversions can be a piece of that if you are a good candidate for it. And the key here is that not everyone's really a good candidate for doing Roth conversions. Perhaps you don't have enough money in a tax deferred account that would make doing a conversion actually worth it, or perhaps your base income amount is too high. So you might have a pension and Social Security already turned on, pushing you above the 12% bracket or already fully into the 12% bracket, and then you don't have any room to do a Roth conversion at a decent tax rate.
• 7:00
  And then finally, too, if you don't have any after tax money to pay the taxes with, you know, cash on the sidelines or something in a brokerage account you can easily access, then it might not be worth doing a conversion in the first place, because you'd have to withhold all your taxes from the converted amount from your IRA amount, and then that would put you in a deeper hole whenever you're trying to grow your tax free Roth, you have a bigger hole to kind of claw out of if you have to take the tax from the conversion amount itself. So, that's the first mistake, converting when you shouldn't be, because you heard someone like myself talking about Roth conversions, how beneficial they might be for you, you just start converting, converting, converting, and then you end up, it's like, oh, I didn't need to do any of that. It actually caused me to pay more taxes by converting than it would have if I didn't convert at all. So that's the first thing. Now, the second thing here is not converting when you should.
• 7:47
  Roth conversions are a powerful strategy, but many people simply don't know about them or are afraid to pay the tax because they just want to kick can down the road. And what that does is that leads to an even larger tax bill for yourself in the future, but also perhaps if you are married, your spouse through the widow's tax trap, because if your spouse inherits your tax deferred money, and they're a single tax filer at that point, they will have to take the same amount of money out of the IRA whenever they reach their RMD age, but they're having to do that as a single tax filer and those tax brackets, as we know, are cut in half or compressed compared to a married filing jointly tax bracket. So that's the widow's tax trap. You essentially, by not converting, created a larger tax bill for your spouse in the future, but even further beyond that would be maybe your kids or grandkids or whoever would receive this inheritance in the future as well. If you don't do any tax planning around this and use some of your low tax years in retirement to do some conversions, if they're necessary for you, you can leave a larger tax bill for your kids or grandkids one day and they're gonna receive 60% of your overall net worth rather than 80 or 90% because you didn't do any tax planning accordingly.
• 8:50
  So Roth conversions when used properly can be a very powerful tax planning strategy. Essentially, you're going to move taxes to instead of being paid in the future, you're going to pay them now at lower tax rates, assuming that your income is low enough, and the tax rate that you could pay that at would be low enough as well. The third mistake is not taking advantage of tax gain harvesting opportunities. Now, Jacob, what is tax gain harvesting? Well, it's whenever you are intentionally selling something that's gone up in value in your brokerage account in a taxable account type at a 0% long term capital gain rate.
• 9:20
  And if you want to learn more about this, again, I've got a video on YouTube, but I also put out an episode here last week diving into this in more detail. So go back and listen to last week's episode where I talked about tax gain harvesting in detail, and how you, if everything lines up perfectly, are able to generate $126,000 of tax free income in your brokerage accounts. So tax gain harvesting, that's what it is, but the reality is most of us have heard of tax loss harvesting instead. Tax loss harvesting is wherever you intentionally sell losses in a brokerage account to offset other gains or your normal income perhaps, and that's limited to $3,000 per year. It's helpful, but maybe not powerful in the way that tax gain harvesting would be.
• 9:57
  So let's really quickly walk through an example of tax gain harvesting to see really how this works. The first thing you have to understand is that long term capital gain rates and kind of the brackets that are associated with them. So I'm gonna look at married filing jointly here today, and you could, you know, look at single if you wanted to. And in fact, if you want a copy of this important number sheet that I'm referring to so often in these different episodes, shoot me an email, I'll send that over to you. No issue.
• 10:19
  It's completely free and no strings attached. But the first long term capital gain bracket is 0%, meaning it's a 0% tax rate. You're not avoiding taxes, that's the actual tax rate. And then it goes to 15%, and it goes to 20%. And these are based on your income levels, your taxable income amount.
• 10:34
  And married filing jointly, $96,700, that is the top of the 0% long term capital gain rate. Okay? So that's a lot of money that's available there for you. Then it goes to 15%, which is 96,000 to 600,000. Again, most people are gonna fall into that category since it's so wide.
• 10:52
  And then if you're above 600,000 of taxable income, you would pay a 20% long term capital gain rate and probably an additional net investment income tax of 3.8%. But again, that's not very many people. So 015%, that's kind of where most people fall in terms of long term capital gains. And I when say long term capital gains, just so you know, long term capital gain is whenever you hold an investment for longer than one year and then you sell it for a gain. Once you've held it for that one year, it qualifies as long term.
• 11:17
  If you sell it before you've held it at least one year, you're gonna have a short term capital gain, and that is the normal income tax rate. So that's not beneficial in any capacity for you from a tax standpoint to do that. So let's focus on the 0% capital gain rate. Okay? So we can have $96,000 of taxable income whenever we are doing that.
• 11:35
  Well, we also remember that married filing jointly this year, have a standard deduction of $30,000 So technically, if we use a standard deduction and the $96,000 of taxable income, we have $126,000 of room for capital gains at a 0% rate. So that's kind of the makeup of how this works. Now, let's just say this, let's say you're retired, okay, you've got a brokerage account, you've got an IRA, you've got a Roth and all the normal stuff. Let's say you need $50,000 a year to live on, okay, and all that money is going to come out of your IRA. So you're going to pull $50,000 out of your IRA.
• 12:09
  Now, you also have a brokerage account that's got $100,000 of gains in the account. Maybe you have some dividends or some interest that comes in as well, so let's call that $5,000 So you got $55,000 of total income that's going to show up there on your tax return. Now, what we could do is we could do some advanced planning here and say, is there a way for us to benefit from realizing some of the gains we have in our brokerage account? So we got $100,000 of gains that we could use to our advantage, but is it smart to do that? So let's look at this.
• 12:41
  Remember, we have $126,000 of total room if we're using the standard deduction and we're married filing jointly, but we also have already taken out $50,000 out of our IRA, so we're going to subtract that out. And now we also have about $5,000 of dividends and interest as well. Okay, so that leaves us $71,000 of room in the 0% long term capital gain bracket that we could realize gains at a 0% tax rate. Alright? So let's say that we wanted to sell $25,000 of capital gains in your brokerage account because you need to go buy a new car or replace the the air conditioning unit or whatever it might be, you need some additional income.
• 13:17
  Alright, to to do something. So you have the opportunity to take that $25,000 out of your brokerage account by selling something that's gone up in value, and you can do that at a zero percent capital gain rate, meaning no tax. You're not paying any tax on that income. And if we compare this to having taken that $25,000 of extra income you need this year, take that out of your IRA instead, you're going pay a tax on that 10 or 12%, whatever it comes out to be. So you could take from your IRA, but it would cost you more in tax than using this tax gain harvesting strategy, where you can pay no tax on the money you need to replace the AC or buy the car or whatever the the big purchase might be.
• 13:52
  Now, remember, we had $71,000 of room there. So if want to buy a nicer car, you could absolutely go do that and do that with tax free money. But this hopefully gives you an example of what you have the opportunity to do. And this doesn't end, you know, with just an IRA distribution. You can think about if you had it if you added IRA distributions, but then also you had some Social Security that was thrown in on top of that.
• 14:10
  Again, you still have a $126,000 of total room there to play with before you go above that and anything above that to $1.26, that would be at the 15% long term capital gain rate. So just know it kind of stacks on top. It's not an all or nothing thing. So if you have, you know, for example, a $125,000 of other income, and then you have a $100,000 of capital gains, you know, $99,000 of those capital gains would be at the 15% rate, only 1,000 would fit into that first 0% bracket. So it's not like an all or nothing thing.
• 14:40
  It's a it's a graduating schedule just like all of the rest of our tax code is. But, I encourage you to go back and listen to last week's episode to learn more about that, but also check out that YouTube video I referenced as well. It'd probably make it a lot more, clear and understandable for you if that doesn't make much sense the first time listening through it. So go check those out. The fourth mistake is not considering Social Security taxes and specifically the Social Security tax torpedo.
• 15:04
  Now, what is this? Well, we have to go back and we have to remember how Social Security taxes are calculated. And the key here is that, you know, you could have 0% of your Social Security benefits subject to taxation, but you could also have up to 85% of your benefits. So not all of your benefits are ever subject to taxation. That's the first thing.
• 15:24
  But you could have as little as none of your benefits being taxable. And a few ways that that's possible is is if you have no other sources of income, so no IRA distributions, no pensions, no anything, and your only form of income, whether you're married or single, is Social Security, then you're not paying tax on any of that because of how it's calculated. Again, I've done a video recently on YouTube, but also put an episode out here on the podcast walking through how that actually works. But it's a three step process. I'm not gonna walk through it right now today, because I want to talk about the tax torpedo part of this.
• 15:52
  That's really the part that gets a lot of people and catches them off guard. But that's that's the key here. So we have to understand that Social Security is a benefit from an income source from a tax perspective. So a lot of people are like, well, why do I have to pay taxes on my benefits? Well, you do kind of if you don't do proper planning or if your situation is just so good that you are going be paying tax on at least 85% of your benefits at all times, because you have enough income all all the other sources.
• 16:16
  So what is the tax torpedo portion? What is that? It's whenever your tax rate on any additional income that might be coming in is taxed at a much higher rate, because more Social Security benefits are getting added into your total tax equation. And again, I'm not going to go into detail here, because I simply don't have enough time to. It'd be a whole episode, and maybe I can do that here soon.
• 16:36
  Let me know if you'd like to hear more about that. But the idea here is let's say you've got $50,000 of Social Security income and you needed to take $20,000 out of your IRA. Okay, in that situation, you'd have minimal tax on your Social Security benefits, but also minimal tax on your IRA distribution. Now, let's say you took another $20,000 out of your IRA. Now, what's going happen is you're going to number one, you're going to obviously have to pay tax on that additional $20,000 but you're also going to make more of your Social Security subject to taxation because you have more income to be added into your calculation to determine how much of your benefits are taxable.
• 17:10
  So every dollar you add from different taxable sources to your income, that's going to increase how much your Social Security is taxable, and the effective tax rate on those additional dollars that are taxable are much higher than whatever your marginal tax rates are. So the effective tax rate, again, of how Social Security works, is going to be higher on that additional dollars that have to be added back in because of this new income source. It's going to be much higher than your marginal tax rate would be of 10%, 1222%. You're going be paying upwards of 30% probably on the new dollars that are now taxable because of that additional income that came in. And the problem with this is I see many people just not considering it.
• 17:45
  They don't understand how Social Security taxes work. They don't understand the impact of taking additional income from that source. So going back to our previous example, where we're talking about tax gain harvesting, if you're not trying to increase how much of your Social Security benefits are taxable, take that additional $20,000 out of a brokerage account if you have that available to you instead of taking it from an IRA because then you don't increase your tax on Social Security. You get to realize those gains you might have there at a 0% capital gain rate, and you have essentially lowered your effective tax rate on that total sum of money you just created for yourself. So that's number four.
• 18:17
  Social Security taxes are huge, and I see people all the time increasing how much of their benefits are taxable simply because of how they take money from their other sources to meet their income needs in retirement. The fifth tax mistake that I see a lot of retirees making is actually not spending their Roth IRA. It's really interesting. I've been thinking about this a little bit. And you know, the rule of thumb typically is to just delay taking money out of your Roth IRA.
• 18:40
  Don't take it from there because you get to continue growing that money tax free, you know, over the next two thousand thirty years so that whenever you get to the back end of retirement, you've got tax free money and you've built up a larger, you know, tax free nest egg for yourself. And mathematically, that's the right answer. But I was thinking, I was like, why are we saving to a Roth IRA and telling ourselves that that's going to create tax free income for ourselves in the future? And then we get there, and then we don't take from the Roth IRA and use the tax free income. You know, it's like, why do why do we tell ourselves that and why do we do that and then not end up doing it the way we said we would?
• 19:14
  Like, that was the whole point of saving to the Roth, right, is so that you would have tax free income throughout retirement. And then you get there and you're not actually gonna spend it ever. That's it's not uncommon for people to never use their Roth money. And and I get there's reasons for that. Maybe you wanna leave a tax free inheritance to your heirs and maybe you want to leave a tax free inheritance for your spouse so they don't have to worry about taxes whenever they're single.
• 19:36
  But my thought process is is different around this. And it's like, well, let's take advantage of the opportunities that we created for ourselves. Why don't we just take advantage of the tax free money we we built for ourselves, use that in appropriate situations. We don't have spend it all first and only, but we can add it into different income sources. So going back to some of these examples we've used, let's go back and say, hey, you need $80,000 a year to live on, and 60,000 is gonna come from your traditional IRA.
• 20:00
  And then you're like, I don't wanna pay any more tax on on any more money, so I'm going to pull the extra 20,000 from my Roth. Like, that's not a bad idea, you know, assuming that everything else kind of makes sense around that and your long term plan isn't in jeopardy by taking from that Roth. You know, maybe you don't need to be doing conversions or you don't need to be spending down your IRA any more than you already are. And so my pushback here and maybe just food for thought for you would be, hey, why are why are you not spending your Roth? Like, that's the whole point of having it.
• 20:28
  Think about different moments or times that you could use it in strategic manner. Don't spend it all upfront and just say I'm going to use my Roth because that probably wouldn't be smart, but you can use it in different, you know, situations throughout your your retirement, your early years, specifically where, hey, I can reduce my overall tax bill, I can use this money that I created for myself, I can use this tax free benefit that I generated. And now, I don't have to worry about paying tax on this additional thing for an additional purchase that's, you know, out of the ordinary, let's say. Maybe you need to buy a new car or a medical bill or or something, anything that makes sense to where you otherwise wouldn't be spending that money that particular year based on a normal budget, but you don't want to take that additional money from your IRA and, you know, increase your tax rate on on your total sum that you're taking out. So think about it.
• 21:11
  I don't know. Maybe maybe there's some different things there to look at. But that's just my question is, why do you have a Roth if you're not going to spend it? And I get there's a mathematical answer to that. But we're humans.
• 21:20
  And so we have the ability to think for ourselves and determine what's right or wrong in each given moment along the way. So that's number five. I see people just everything just not spending their Roth simply because it will create more money for them whenever they're 85 that's tax free and they can't even use it. No one dreams of having a million dollars in a Roth IRA one day just to not be able to use it. So I just wanted to push back on that philosophy just a little bit.
• 21:40
  And I'm interested if you have questions or want to speak on that, shoot me an email. Happy to converse back and forth with you there. Alright. The sixth and final thing that most people make mistakes around from a tax perspective in retirement is having no asset location. I've talked about this so many different times.
• 21:54
  It's one of the easiest things that anyone can do to reduce their taxes every single year. But asset location is whenever we're trying to align the investment type, the security that what we're holding investing in in the correct account type. So think of it this way, whenever you own a bond fund, or a CD, or a treasury, those are all going to generate interest. Okay? So all that interest is going to be taxed at a normal income tax rate is not receiving sort of qualified dividend or qualified interest tax treatment.
• 22:22
  There's no such thing as those on that type of investment. Now, a stock fund, which is a long term investment holding, those dividends are often qualified, meaning they receive a better tax treatment. They receive that long term capital gain tax treatment that the interest does not receive. If we think about those two things, it might make sense to align how those different investments are going to be taxed with the different account types and how those different account types are taxed. So here's what I mean.
• 22:46
  A traditional IRA, that is every time you take money out of that account is going to be taxed as normal income. There's no way around that. There's no changes to that. There's no long term capital gains. Every single time you take money out of a traditional IRA, it will be taxed as normal income.
• 22:59
  Now, anytime you take money out of a Roth IRA, assuming that the accounts been open for five years and you're 59 and 0.5 at the time of distribution, every single dollar is tax free. Okay? Now you can take your contributions out at any point, no questions asked, and that's also tax free. But if you want to take any gains out, you have to wait until those two different rules are met that I just mentioned. So if that's the scenario, you might want to hold a specific type of investment in that account type, and I'm going to walk through which ones here in just a moment.
• 23:26
  And then for finally, your brokerage account, since that account is taxed every single year, you're paying tax on any capital gains you're realizing, you're paying tax on any dividends or interest that might be coming in, those all taxable every single year, you're going to get a ten ninety nine tax form that you've got to file on your tax return. So if that's the scenario, we might want to minimize how much dividends, interest or capital gains we realized in that account so that we don't have a higher taxable amount every single year. So with all that considered, it doesn't make sense to hold the exact same allocations across all three account types. Seventy thirty, seventy thirty, seventy thirty, that does not make sense because what you're not doing there is you're not using asset location appropriately. In fact, what you should probably be doing in that scenario is holding 100% of your Roth IRA in equities, which are going to grow more number one, you have more tax free benefit down the road for yourself, you're compounding at a higher rate.
• 24:13
  But also your brokerage account, if you remember that that's taxed annually, we might want to hold lower dividend or lower interest bearing assets in that account so that you have less dividends and interest. And then also too, if you hold stock funds or stocks in general, you can then qualify for long term capital gains in that account, which again, would be taxed at a lower rate once you've held that for at least a year and sell it after that. So it's typically wise to hold your, again, higher growth assets in your brokerage account so that you can receive that long term capital gain treatment or qualified dividend treatment. And then finally, on the traditional IRA side, since every dollar that you take out of there is going to be taxed as normal income no matter what, it might make sense to hold your fixed income, your bonds, your treasuries, your CDs, anything that's producing interest and perhaps growing at a lower rate, all that should be probably held in your traditional IRA. Now, it doesn't always line up exactly right with what your total investment allocation should be.
• 25:05
  So you typically are gonna have to hold some sort of stock positions in your IRA, But any and all of your fixed income positions should likely be held in your traditional IRA rather than a Roth and rather than a brokerage account. And sometimes you gotta hold some money market in a brokerage account for a little bit of liquidity. I understand that. But in general, you don't want to just hold a bunch of bonds there just because your allocation says to be $70.30 across the board or whatever it might be. You just have to think about this correctly so that every single year, you're paying lower taxes because you got less tax being generated in your brokerage account.
• 25:38
  But if you think long term as well, in some sense, you kind of want to, I guess, minimize or reduce the amount of growth you might have in your tax deferred account being your traditional IRA. Because what could happen there is if you have really high growth stuff, you're just building up a larger tax bill for yourself whenever you get to RMD age, and now you've built up really large RMDs that you otherwise don't need. So maybe kind of limiting the amount of growth or lowering how much growth you actually want in your tax deferred accounts is a smart thing to do. Yes, on paper, it's less money, but it creates less tax issues in the future and let your Roth IRA and your brokerage account let those two accounts be focused on doing the growth for you. And so what you're building out here is your total sum of money is actually growing properly.
• 26:23
  So you're using asset location to your advantage to where you can pay less tax now every single year, but also perhaps pay a lot less tax in the future because of these few different changes. So those are the six things that I see are just common mistakes for most retirees, I want you to avoid them. So that's why I shared them with you. If you have questions, or comments or things you want to talk about, reach out to me. I'm happy to have a conversation with you.
• 26:44
  And if you're looking for someone to help actually build out your plan with you, I know this stuff can be a lot, then reach out to me, schedule an intro call, I can tell you more about what we do for our clients and how we help and see if we might be a good fit to be able to help you as well. So I hope this has been beneficial for you. We'll talk to you again next week. Hey, it's Jacob again, and I wanted to extend a quick offer to you. If you have a question and you would like to have it answered here on the show, please email me at Jacob@retirementanswers.net.
• 27:12
  And I'd love to answer that question for you right here on the show. Also, I wanted to remind you that nothing discussed in today's episode is meant to be financial, legal, or tax advice. Retirement Answers is for educational purposes only. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode. I look forward to talking with you again next week.