Using Wealth Well
One Day You'll Earn Your Last Paycheck
Retirement isn't just an age or an account balance. It's an income problem — and it's worth solving before you need the answer.
The paycheck you don't notice
For most of your working life, income arrives with a regularity that makes it easy to take for granted. A paycheck appears every two weeks. Bills get paid. Savings accumulate. The system runs. It's only when you start thinking seriously about retirement that you realize how much of your financial life depends on that paycheck continuing — and how different things will look when it stops.
Retirement as an income problem
Most retirement conversations focus on account balances: how much do I need to save? But the more useful frame is income: how will I replace my paycheck? A large account balance is only useful to the extent that it can be converted into reliable, sustainable income. The conversion — how you draw from your accounts, in what order, at what rate — is where many retirement plans succeed or struggle.
The sources worth understanding
Retirement income typically comes from several sources: Social Security, workplace retirement accounts, personal savings and investments, and sometimes pensions, annuities, or part-time work. Each source has different timing, different tax treatment, and different implications for how the others should be managed. Understanding how they fit together — not just how much each one provides — is the work of retirement income planning.
The sequencing question
One of the most consequential decisions in retirement is the order in which you draw from different accounts. Drawing from taxable accounts first, then tax-deferred, then Roth — or some variation of that sequence — can meaningfully affect how long your money lasts and how much you pay in taxes over the course of retirement. This isn't a detail. It's a decision worth making deliberately.
Build the next paycheck before you need it
The best time to think about retirement income is before you need it — ideally years before. Not because the decisions are complicated, but because some of them take time to implement. Social Security timing. Roth conversion opportunities. Account consolidation. Insurance decisions. These are easier to address thoughtfully when you're not yet dependent on the answers.
One day you'll earn your last paycheck. The goal is to have already built the next one before that day arrives.
If you're within ten years of retirement and haven't thought carefully about income sequencing, that's worth putting on the agenda.