Discover the tips and strategies that will help you achieve your retirement goals.

I'm your host, James Canole, and this is the podcast dedicated to helping you retire well.

It all starts right here of Ready for Retirement. I'm your host,

James Cannell. And we have a topic today that I love. It's a listener question. It's someone

submitted a question. And to me, this question hits on one of the most important parts of retirement planning. It's not necessarily just about investments. It's not just about income and retirement. It's about keeping your taxes as low as they possibly can be throughout retirement. And that is one of the areas where most people are leaving money on the table.

People hear tax planning sometime.

And they say, okay, that's great.

You know, if I had a business, if I had all these things, I'm sure you could do a lot of

great tax planning.

But I've just earned a W-2 wage my whole life.

And I've done a good job of saving and investing.

But other than maybe writing off my mortgage interest or state taxes or giving, I don't see

how tax planning will apply to me. So I'm excited for today's question because I think today's

question as we go through it will answer a lot of those questions for people so that maybe

you can start to see where there's opportunities in your own situation to keep your taxes

as low as possible in retirement. So I'm going to read the

question. This question is, of course, specific to one listener, but I'm going to provide a framework

and a way of thinking about this that everyone can apply to their situation so you can see how it

could possibly be used in your situation. So let's jump in. Here's a question. It says, I have just started a retirement

at age 61. My wife and I have $1.9 million in traditional IRAs, $700,000 in taxable savings accounts,

and $130,000 in a Roth IRA. We are currently living off of a pension in our savings, electing

to defer Social Security until

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