You should begin planning your retirement tax strategy well before you actually retire.

Now, this does not mean that you need to know every single meticulous detail about where will

tax brackets be, what will your withdrawal strategy look like, what exactly will taxes be,

but it does mean that you should have a general understanding about some of those things and

you should have a general understanding about how your current assets and income sources

might impact that. That's exactly what we're going to discuss on today's episode

Ready for Retirement as we unpack a listener's question who is planning for retirement, but

very unsure about how to plan for some of these various items.

This is another episode of Ready for Retirement. I'm your host, James Connell, and I'm here to teach you how to get the most of the life with your money.

And now, on the episode.

This question comes from Jody, and Jody says the following.

I've been binging on James' podcast and have recently started binging on Aries.

I love your podcast and listen as often as I can, and you both talk about ways

to pay lower taxes, and I feel like my net worth breakdown does not allow me to do this.

I'm on the high end of the 22% tax bracket, so when I look at tax plays, I never seem to

get out of this tax bracket. Here's our current situation. My husband and I are 57 years old,

and we will retire at age 63. We have $188,000 in a brokerage account, $1.1 million in 401k in IRAs,

$860,000 in Roth IRAs, $155,000 in health savings accounts, $69,000 for a total net worth

of about $2.37 million, excluding our home. Our home is worth

$610,000 and it will be paid off when I turn 61. Our goal is to live at our lives in our current

ranch home. I make $165,000 per year and my husband makes $41,000. We put $55,000 into our Roth

each year, and we max out our HSA each year as well. My husband gets $1,000. We put $55,000 into our Roth each year, and we max out our HSA each year as

...