The Decade Before RMDs.
The eight to twelve years between retirement and the first required minimum distribution are, for most affluent households, the most consequential tax and income-planning window of a lifetime. This site is an educational resource on what happens in that window, and why it gets decided wrong more often than it gets decided well.
Four Categories of Decision That Show Up Only in This Window.
Each is well-known in isolation. Each interacts with the others. The combined optimization is what makes the gap years distinctive — and what makes generic accumulation-era advice an unreliable guide.
Bracket Management Before RMDs Begin.
Between the end of W-2 income and the start of forced distributions at age 73 (or 75 under SECURE 2.0), households briefly control their own taxable income. The bracket they choose to fill — 12%, 22%, 24% — determines the tax cost of every dollar that later comes out as an RMD. The intuition that "low bracket means do nothing" is often wrong for $1M+ tax-deferred balances; the relevant comparison is the bracket faced now versus the bracket faced at 73.
IRMAA as a Tax-Equivalent Cliff.
IRMAA — the income-related Medicare premium surcharge — adds hundreds to several thousand dollars per year per couple when modified AGI crosses a tier. Tiers are cliffs, not curves; the two-year lookback makes the cost invisible at decision time. Plans that optimize federal brackets without modeling IRMAA year by year routinely cross tiers by accident.
Guaranteed Income as a Sizing Question.
Whether to buy an annuity is rarely the right question; how much guaranteed income to floor — and at what cost — is. The portion worth flooring is the slice of essential expenses that, if a portfolio fell short, would force a sale of the home or a real change in lifestyle. That number can be computed from a household budget; it is usually smaller than an insurance agent will suggest and larger than a fee-only adviser will entertain.
Survivorship: the Single-Filer Years.
Filing status changes from Married Filing Jointly to Single in the year after one spouse dies. Income may not change much; the brackets are cut roughly in half, and IRMAA tiers fall accordingly. A meaningful share of a retirement plan's lifetime value is realized 10–20 years after the original analysis, by the surviving spouse — and is usually unmodeled.
A Hypothetical $1.8M IRA at Age 64.
Illustrative only. Not a recommendation. Not based on any specific household.
The setup. Imagine a married couple, both 64, with $1.8M in a traditional IRA, $400K in a taxable brokerage account, $250K in a Roth IRA, and $100K cash. No pension. Both plan to claim Social Security at 70. Health is good. The aggregate balance reads as "on track" by most rules of thumb. Three questions sit underneath that read.
First question — how much could plausibly be converted to Roth, and at what bracket? Six years of conversions filling the 22% bracket (roughly $140K of conversion income per year) would pay approximately $30K of federal tax annually, or about $180K total. By age 70, roughly $840K would have moved out of the traditional IRA. At age 73, RMDs on the remaining balance would run near $54K per year, against a counterfactual of roughly $110K. The lifetime federal-tax differential is in the neighborhood of $280K. The point is not the specific number; it is that the bracket-fill question can only be asked during this window.
Second question — where do the conversions land relative to IRMAA? $140K of conversion income plus modest dividend yield lands MAGI around $185K — under the 2026 IRMAA tier 1 threshold of $212K (MFJ). No Medicare surcharge during the conversion years. After 70, conversions stop and Social Security begins; MAGI lands in a different but predictable place that requires its own modeling. The accident to avoid is blowing through an IRMAA tier without realizing it; the strategic choice is sometimes blowing through one deliberately, in exchange for escaping a structurally higher future bracket.
Third question — what happens if one spouse dies at 80? Under the conversion path, the surviving spouse\'s RMD is ~$54K, Social Security ~$50K, plus modest dividend income — AGI around $115K, comfortably under the 2026 IRMAA Single tier 1 of $170K. Without conversions, the same scenario produces AGI of ~$165K, crossing IRMAA, and pushes income into the 24% Single bracket. The differential is roughly $4–5K per year, every year the survivor is alive after 80. Two decades of that is $80–100K. Survivorship is the single most under-modeled scenario in retirement planning.
What this illustration does not show — the underlying year-by-year schedule, the explicit assumption block, the survivor-mortality scenarios, the IRMAA stairs, the treatment of an existing taxable brokerage account with embedded gain, the interaction with state tax, the Social Security taxation thresholds. One decision out of dozens. The purpose here is to make the categories concrete, not to recommend a course of action.
Where This Is Going.
Algoli Advisors is being built as a retirement income planning practice focused on the decade between retirement and the first required minimum distribution. This site is an educational resource in the interim.
Founded by Rikin Shah — Stanford MBA, Columbia Applied Math, J.P. Morgan, Stone Point Capital, founder of GetSure Insurance Agency, author of IUL On Trial.
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