Retirement planning advice usually arrives aimed at the young: start early, compound everything. But the decade that actually decides most retirements is the 60s — when benefit-claiming ages, tax windows and account rules converge into a set of choices that are difficult or impossible to reverse. The Social Security Administration’s retirement guidance sets out the claiming framework; our money guides translate it into an action list. Here are the five moves advisers say matter most.
1. Treat the Claiming Decision as the Big One
Claiming Social Security at 62 versus delaying toward 70 changes the monthly benefit by roughly three-quarters — a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted difference that lasts for life and anchors a surviving spouse’s income too. Delaying is not right for everyone: health, employment and cash needs are real constraints. But it should be a decision, made with numbers on the table, rather than a default triggered by reaching the earliest eligible birthday.
2. Use the Low-Income Tax Window
The years between retirement and the start of required minimum distributions often feature unusually low income — and therefore unusually low tax brackets. That window is the prime opportunity for Roth conversions: moving money from traditional retirement accounts, paying tax at today’s low rate, and securing tax-free income later. Done in measured annual slices, conversions can reduce lifetime tax by six figures for some households. The strategy is powerful and unforgiving of sloppy execution, since conversions interact with Medicare premium surcharges and benefit taxation; Investopedia’s retirement resources walk through the mechanics carefully.
3. Re-sequence Your Accounts
Which account you spend from, in which order, is a tax decision disguised as a bookkeeping one. The common sequence — taxable accounts first, then tax-deferred, then Roth — is a reasonable starting point, but the optimal order depends on your bracket trajectory across retirement. What matters is having a sequence at all, reviewed annually, rather than drawing from whichever account is most familiar.
4. Re-audit Insurance You Bought Decades Ago
Policies bought at 40 answer questions your 60s may no longer ask. Life insurance sized to protect a young family’s income may now be redundant — or convertible into long-term-care protection, the risk that actually threatens retirement savings. Meanwhile, the health-insurance bridge between retirement and Medicare eligibility at 65 is the single most common budget shock for early retirees, and it must be priced before the retirement date is chosen, not after.
5. Write the Plan Down — Including the Non-Financial Parts
The households that navigate this decade best treat it as one integrated plan: claiming, taxes, accounts, insurance, housing and estate documents reviewed together, because each choice moves the others. They also plan the life the money is for — work in some form, location, family commitments — since a retirement budget is a description of a life before it is a spreadsheet.
The Move People Forget: Rehearse the Retirement
Advisers who specialise in this decade add a sixth, unofficial move: rehearse. Live for a few months on the projected retirement budget while still working, and the plan’s fictions reveal themselves — the spending categories underestimated, the costs that vanish, the activities that turn out to matter more than the spreadsheet assumed. The rehearsal converts retirement from an abstraction with a date into a tested routine with numbers that have survived contact with reality.
It also surfaces the emotional ledger early: identity, structure and social life are line items too, and discovering their weight while you can still adjust course is worth more than a marginal tax optimisation. The financial moves in this guide build the floor. The rehearsal decides what the floor is for.
None of these moves is complicated in isolation. Their power is in the sequencing, and their cost is in delay: the window is real, and it closes. More retirement guidance is available in our guides section.
