Retirement Savings Checklist: 10 Years Before You Stop Working

At thirty-five, a bad decade costs you time: you recover it with years of contributions. At fifty-eight, a bad decade costs you permanent dollars, because there is no runway left to rebuild it. That asymmetry is the entire reason the last ten years deserve their own checklist. Nothing in it is exotic — most clients have heard of every item. What is rare is doing them in the right order, in the right year, before a deadline you did not know existed closes.

01Re-run the maths from the finish line backwards

Most household plans are built forwards: save this much, grow at seven percent, hope. Ten years out you should flip it. Write down the annual after-tax spending you actually want, add the two things people forget — travel years one to five and the insurance gap between retiring and Medicare at 65 — then multiply by the number of years you expect to draw it. Applying a 4% starting withdrawal to that requirement tells you the portfolio you need, and the gap between that and today's balance converts into a precise monthly saving figure. If the number is uncomfortable, the discomfort is the deliverable: it is the only version of the conversation that still lets you change the outcome.

02Use the catch-up rules while they still apply to you

For 2026 the employee deferral limit on 401(k)-type plans sits at $24,500, with an additional catch-up of $8,000 from age 50 — and the higher "super catch-up" band for ages 60 to 63 allows $11,250 of extra deferral. IRA contributions top out at $7,500 with a $1,000 catch-up. Two rules changed recently and are still tripping people up: catch-up contributions above a $145,000 prior-year W-2 must be made on a Roth basis, and new designated Roth accounts inside a plan are subject to Roth-only treatment at that income level. Confirm limits directly with your plan administrator; they are indexed and the summary document lies quietly out of date.

03Find the low-income years and convert into them

If you will have any year between retirement and required minimum distributions where taxable income drops — the classic window is 65 to 72 for someone who stops working at 64 — that gap is a discount on future tax. Converting traditional IRA money to Roth in those years fills up low brackets at rates of 10% and 12% that you may never see again, reduces later RMDs, and can lower Medicare premium exposure. The two things that ruin it are converting from a leveraged position (borrowing to pay the tax) and doing it in the year you also realise a house sale or a bonus. We model conversions three years ahead, in $10,000 blocks, and stop one bracket short of the cliff.

04Treat Social Security as an investment decision

Claiming early reduces your permanent benefit by roughly 30% compared with full retirement age; deferring past it earns delayed retirement credits of 8% a year to age 70 — a real, inflation-indexed, government-backed return that no annuity in the private market matches at that price. The right answer is not "wait", it is what your health, your spouse's earnings record and your portfolio's need for cash between retiring and claiming all say. One detail with disproportionate value for married couples: the higher earner's claiming decision sets the survivor benefit for life, so maximising it is an insurance purchase for whoever is left. Run both records, not just yours.

05Build a drawdown order, not just a portfolio

Sequence risk is not a market problem, it is a liquidity problem. Ten years out, start constructing a reserve: two years of planned spending in cash and short-duration fixed income, ideally funded from bonus, overtime and the debt payment you will no longer have. Then write the order you will spend from when a bad year hits — taxable cash first, then bonds, then the portfolio's most tax-advantaged accounts last — so you are never forced to sell equities at the bottom to pay a mortgage. Clients who hold a documented bucket allocation cut their probability of an unplanned equity sale in a drawdown by more than half in our own reviews.

06Retire into the smallest fixed obligation you can

The mortgage is the usual one. Ten years is usually exactly the runway needed to either pay it down or refinance into a term that finishes before you stop working — a 10- or 15-year loan at 6% that amortises by 65 beats a 30-year at 5.75% that follows you into retirement. Run the payment-versus- opportunity-cost comparison properly: if you are still funding a Roth at the limit and holding a solid reserve, extra principal is a 6% risk-free return on a retired household's cash, which is not nothing. Also close any car loans, and get rid of the private mortgage insurance if 20% equity now exists — that is a guaranteed saving with no market risk attached.

07Price the two bills people under-fund

Retiring before 65 means buying your own coverage, and in Tennessee a healthy 61-year-old couple can face $14,000 to $22,000 a year in premiums before a deductible — with subsidies that phase out as taxable income rises, so the year you accelerate income also raises your insurance cost. Then there is Medicare's IRMAA: premiums step up once modified adjusted gross income crosses published thresholds, and a single large event — a Roth conversion, a business sale, an un-harvested capital gain — can push you into a higher tier for a year and, because it is assessed two years in arrears, surprise you long after the decision. Budget both numbers in the plan, not in a footnote.

08Align the paperwork with the plan

More retirement outcomes are wrecked by stale beneficiary designations than by asset allocation. Ten years out is the moment to check every account's named beneficiary against your current will, confirm contingent beneficiaries exist, review spousal consent where you are married in a community or quasi-community state, and re-verify that a divorce decree from years ago is being honoured or has been updated. Do the same for long-term care and disability cover while you are still insurable, and check whether your employer's group life expires the day your employment does — because most people assume it follows them home.

09Then review twice a year, on purpose

Advisers see the same three mistakes in this decade: a plan reviewed only when the market falls, a portfolio whose equity share was set by default in 1998 and never re-examined, and one account — the old employer's 401(k) — still carrying 0.8% in an institutional share class that a ten-minute consolidation would remove. Our pre-retirement review takes ninety minutes, twice a year, and produces a one-page action list with dates. If nothing needs to change, the one page says so in writing. That is the whole value: no drift, no panic selling, and no year where the decision you should have made at sixty quietly became a decision you had to make at sixty-six under worse conditions.