No decade concentrates financial consequence like your 60s. Retirement dates firm up, pension and Social Security claiming decisions come due, tax brackets temporarily dip, and healthcare planning stops being theoretical. Financial planners describe the decade as a series of one-way doors: choices that are cheap to make at 62 and impossible to remake at 72. Here are the five moves they raise most often.
1. Treat Social Security Claiming as a Strategy, Not a Date
Claiming early permanently reduces monthly benefits, while delaying past full retirement age increases them by roughly eight percent a year until 70. For married couples, the higher earner’s claiming age also sets the survivor benefit, making it a joint decision with decades of consequences. The Social Security Administration’s calculators let households model the scenarios rather than guess.
2. Use the Low-Income Tax Window
The years between retiring and taking required minimum distributions often bring unusually low taxable income. Planners use that window for Roth conversions, moving money from traditional accounts at temporarily low rates so future withdrawals come out tax-free. It is one of the few legal ways to choose your tax bracket, and the window closes on its own.
3. Decide Healthcare Before Medicare Decides for You
Medicare enrollment timing, supplemental coverage and the treatment of health savings accounts all carry penalties for improvisation. Those retiring before 65 face a separate bridge-coverage problem. Planners advise pricing the whole path, including the income-based premium surcharges that catch affluent retirees by surprise. Guides from Investopedia’s retirement library break down the enrollment calendar in plain language.
4. Rebuild the Portfolio for Income, Not Growth
The portfolio that accumulated wealth is rarely the one that should distribute it. Sequence risk, a bad market in the first retirement years, does outsized damage, so planners typically build a few years of planned spending in stable assets and let the rest stay invested. Our money section covers asset-location tactics that pair with this shift.
5. Finish the Paperwork Decade
Wills, powers of attorney, healthcare directives and beneficiary designations are unglamorous and decisive. Beneficiary forms override wills, so reviewing them is the highest-value hour in the whole list. Your 60s reward preparation more richly than any decade before them, because there is finally both something to protect and time left to protect it well.
The Conversation to Have With Your Planner
The five moves share a common requirement: they work best when sequenced deliberately rather than handled as isolated decisions. Claiming strategy interacts with Roth conversions, which interact with Medicare premium thresholds, which interact with portfolio withdrawals, and optimising each in isolation can quietly sabotage the others. That is why planners increasingly model the whole decade as one system, running scenarios that trade small costs in one area for large gains in another. For do-it-yourself households, the practical takeaway is to get at least one comprehensive review in the early sixties, when the window is widest and the most options are still reversible. The review need not be expensive or ongoing; a single engagement with a fee-only planner, armed with your account statements and tax returns, can map the sequence. After that, the job is execution and periodic checks. The window years reward the prepared precisely because they punish the improvising, and the difference between the two, compounded over thirty years of retirement, is often the largest sum of money the household will ever move.