Retirement Tax Planning: You Saved the Money, Now Plan the Taxes On It

Retirement tax planning is the service of deciding, with actual numbers, how your retirement money gets taxed: which accounts you fund while working, when pre-tax dollars convert to Roth, and which account you draw from first when income stops. We deliver a written plan, then prepare the returns and coordinate the moving parts so it gets executed.

What it is not: investment management. We do not pick funds, hold your assets, or charge a percentage of them. That separation matters, when the firm recommending a Roth conversion also earns fees on your account balance, the advice has a thumb on the scale. Ours is flat-fee tax work, coordinated with whoever manages the portfolio.

If you want the educational background first, how retirement income is taxed, what RMDs and IRMAA are, how the three tax buckets work, read our free retirement tax planning guide. This page describes the service for people ready to have it done.

High earners with big pre-tax balances. If you have maxed a traditional 401(k) for fifteen or twenty years, you have done the saving right and the tax location wrong-by-default. Seven-figure pre-tax balances produce large forced distributions later. The earlier the rebalancing between tax buckets starts, the cheaper it is.

Business owners and 1099 professionals. Owners are not limited to employee contribution caps, plan design is the lever. A consistent six-figure-profit business can often deduct multiples of what a standard 401(k) allows through a solo 401(k), layered profit sharing, or a cash balance plan. This is regular work for us across physicians, consultants, and agency owners. Once you bring on employees, the plan menu changes; see our SEP IRA vs SIMPLE IRA comparison for the small-business options.

People within about ten years of retirement. The years between the last paycheck and the start of required distributions and Social Security are usually the lowest-bracket years of your adult life. They are also temporary. A deliberate plan uses them; the default wastes them.

Every engagement follows the same arc, diagnose, design, implement, and produces specific deliverables:

Two things distinguish the implementation step. First, deadlines: many business retirement plans must be established by year-end, employer plan features take months to confirm, and Roth conversions cannot be undone after December 31. We run the calendar so the plan does not die of timing. Second, the filings: because we also prepare your returns, the plan and the tax return are produced by the same firm, and the conversion that was modeled is the conversion that gets reported.

The strategies themselves are not secrets, the value is in sizing them to your numbers, sequencing them across years, and executing the paperwork correctly. The ones that carry most of the weight:

• Roth conversion schedules, multi-year, bracket-targeted conversions, modeled against Medicare thresholds and state tax. Full mechanics in our Roth conversions guide.
• Backdoor and mega backdoor Roth. Roth funding above the income limits, with the pro-rata trap checked before any money moves, since other pre-tax IRA balances can make a backdoor conversion partly taxable.
• Solo 401(k) design for owner-only businesses, often the highest-leverage account a 1099 professional has. See the solo 401(k) guide, and our Roth 401(k) vs 401(k) comparison for how to set the deferral election. Hospital and nonprofit employees with a 403(b) face a similar sequencing question; see 403(b) vs Roth IRA: which to fund first.
• Defined benefit and cash balance plans for consistently high-profit owners, large deductions in exchange for funding commitments and actuarial design. We compare the trade-offs in defined benefit vs. defined contribution plans.
• HSA maximization and NUA review, the HSA's deduction-growth-withdrawal treatment makes it a stealth retirement account, and employer stock inside a 401(k) deserves a net unrealized appreciation analysis before any rollover, because a routine rollover permanently forfeits the option.

Which of these apply, and in what order, is the design problem. A W-2 tech employee, a locums physician, and a practice owner with staff get three different plans from the same toolbox.

• A proactive planning firm, not a once-a-year preparer. Retirement tax outcomes are set by decisions made years before the return is filed. Our engagements are quantified, multi-year, and revisited annually.
• No assets under management, no product to sell. Flat-fee tax work means the conversion and contribution advice is driven by your tax math alone. We coordinate with your financial advisor rather than competing with them.
• Deep business-owner bench. CPA + MBA-led, with daily work in S-corps, reasonable compensation, and owner retirement plan design, the place where the biggest retirement deductions live.
• Nationwide remote, 1,000+ clients, all 50 states. Including genuine multi-state expertise for clients who plan to retire in a different state than they worked in, a tax decision in its own right.
• Trusted in the physician community. As featured in White Coat Investor (Podcast Episode #459). High-income professionals are who this firm was built around.

Retirement planning rarely travels alone, it usually pairs with the bracket, entity, and equity work described on our high-income tax planning page. One firm, one coordinated plan.