Retirement

8 Pre-Retirement Tasks to Address

By Chris Duderstadt

June 12, 2025

8 Pre-Retirement Tasks to Address

Key Points – 8 Pre-Retirement Tasks to Address

  • Considering the Wants and Needs of Your Spouse Pre-Retirement
  • What Are Your Income, Investment, and Tax Strategies?
  • Creating a Fluid, Forward-Looking Financial Plan
  • Building a Plan That’s Designed with Your Goals in Mind
  • 8-Minute Read | 34-Minute Watch

What Do You Need to Be Thinking About Pre-Retirement

Retirement can be one of the most exciting times of your life if you plan for it. That “if you plan for it” part is critical. It can be hard for some people to believe that there’s more that they need to do to get ready for retirement than save, save, save. The goal isn’t just to get to retirement; it’s to get through retirement. We’re going to review some key things to think about as you’re getting ready for retirement.

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1. Create a Financial Plan That’s Fluid and Forward-Looking

As you’re reviewing these pre-retirement tasks, keep in mind that your needs and goals are going to change as you go through retirement. Ideally, you (and your spouse if you’re married) will be active and healthy for most of your retirement, but it’s important to plan for the unexpected. What if you or your spouse suddenly require a long-term care stay or pass away unexpectedly? How would that impact the surviving spouse? It’s important to plan for those potential situations.

Retirement planning is all about controlling what you can control and planning for what you can’t control. When you’re building your financial plan, you can also stress test it for events such as high inflation, a big market downturn, or forced retirement.

Stress testing doesn’t just deal with negative things either. If you want to take a fun trip or help pay for your grandchild’s education, put it into your plan. How did it impact your plan’s probability of success? If it made you more uncomfortable than you’d like, what trade-offs can be made so that you can still achieve your goals? If you stress test for all that pre-retirement, that could help build confidence in your financial situation.

2. Determine What’s Important to You and Your Spouse

Sure, just the thought of retirement can feel great. But what are you going to do in retirement? What are your goals? When you’re no longer working, you’ll suddenly have a lot more time on your hands to accomplish your goals.

However, your retirement plan isn’t complete if your goals are the only goals you’re considering. You also need to consider the things that are important to your spouse as well. Even if you don’t have a significant other, do you have family and friends that you want to spend more time with in retirement? That’s almost always the number one goal for people in retirement.

If you’re married, it’s crucial for you and your spouse to be on the same page pre-retirement. We have something that can help you and your spouse with that. It’s our Retirement Plan Checklist, which consists of 30 yes-or-no questions about critical retirement considerations and an age-based timeline of things to keep in mind pre-retirement and during retirement. Download your copy below and review it with your spouse!

Pre-Retirement

Retirement Plan Checklist

2. Having a Conversation with a CFP® Professional

No matter how well you and your spouse get along, there are going to be things big and small that you disagree on. How do you and your spouse find a middle ground when those situations arise? When it comes to financial planning and getting ready for retirement, reaching agreements with your spouse could be difficult. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s good that you’re both passionate about what you want retirement to look like.

Getting ready for retirement needs to involve a CFP® Professional that builds a goals-based financial plan that’s personalized for you and your spouse. If you and your spouse meet with a financial professional who immediately starts talking about investments, you’re not talking to a CFP® Professional. A CFP® Professional isn’t looking to sell you investments and understands that investments are just an engine that makes your plan work for you. A good CFP® Professional will be working alongside CPAs that review your plan from a tax perspective.

A CPA working directly with a CFP® Professional helps to ensure that our clients’ needs are met from a tax perspective. Not only should CFP® Professionals work alongside CPAs, but there should also be estate planning, insurance, and even investment professionals to support them and their clients’ visions. This is something we pride ourselves on at Modern Wealth. Getting ready for retirement is a team effort. We encourage you to get the ball rolling with that process by having a discussion with your spouse and a CFP® Professional about what’s important to you.

3. Have a Conversation with a Team of Financial Professionals

Creating a fluid, forward-looking financial plan that’s tailored to you and your spouse’s goals requires a lot of time and effort during your pre-retirement years and during retirement. Do you think you and your spouse can handle that responsibility on your own? Better yet, do you think one advisor can handle that responsibility on their own? Instead of dwelling on those possibilities, consider working with a team of financial professionals that collaborates on your behalf.

As our advisors build and update personalized financial plans, they consistently work alongside our other subject matter experts. A big part of our team approach at Modern Wealth focuses on the collaboration between the four C’s at Modern Wealth: CFP® Professionals, CPAs, CFAs, and most importantly, our clients. Additionally, we have estate planning and insurance specialists that play key roles as well.

Addressing these pre-retirement tasks is a team effort. We encourage you to get the ball rolling with that process by having a discussion about what’s important to you with your spouse and a team of financial professionals.

4. Understand Your Income Sources

Next up on our list of pre-retirement tasks to address is understanding your income sources. How are you going to pay for your needs, wants, and wishes in retirement? You have your fixed income, which includes Social Security, pensions, and rental income. Your other assets could include your 401(k)s, IRAs, and brokerage accounts.

It’s important to be diligent about how much you’re saving pre-retirement. But understanding where you’re saving to and why it matters is just as important. How is your retirement income going to be taxed? If you have $1.5 million saved in a traditional 401(k), that’s great. However, you need to realize that you don’t actually have $1.5 million because your traditional 401(k) is a tax-deferred asset. That money won’t be taxed until you take it out. It’s all about what you have net after taxes.

It can be easy to blindly save as you’re working, especially since you have a salary and have insurance plans through your employer. But once you retire, you no longer have a set amount of income that you’ll be getting each week, month, and year. That’s why you need to have an income strategy in retirement. No one knows exactly how long their retirement will be, so this part is tricky. While there are various health risks that can shorten your life expectancy, longevity risk is very real as well. It’s critical to have an income strategy that takes you to and through retirement.

5. Create a Withdrawal Strategy That Allows You to Live the Way You Want to Live

Our next pre-retirement task to address ties right in with No. 4. You need to have a withdrawal strategy in retirement that encompasses all your income sources. What income source are you going to spend from first in retirement? Should you take from the tax-deferred, taxable, or tax-free bucket first or should it be a combination of those?

Think of your retirement as being split up into three phases: your go-go, slow-go, and no-go years. Consider spending more at the beginning of retirement (your go-go years) when you might be able to live a more active lifestyle. You might still be healthy during your slow-go years, but might not have the desire to be on the go and therefore might not have as many expenses. But it’s important to have enough saved for the final few years of your life (and your spouse’s life) to accommodate for potential medical/long-term care costs. You need to have a distribution and withdrawal strategy that’s tailored to your unique situation.

Your distribution and withdrawal strategy are different things. That’s because you need to consider sequence of returns risk as a part of your withdrawal strategy. Your portfolio needs to be able to handle the possibility of prolonged poor market conditions during your retirement. Again, this is why it’s important to have a fluid, forward-looking financial plan that’s been stress tested against all the things we mentioned earlier. The fear of running out of money in retirement is a very real fear for many people. Creating a withdrawal strategy that allows you to live the way you want to live may help with mitigating that fear.

6. Create a Multi-Year Tax Strategy

Along with thinking about how you’ll be affected by the tax implications of your retirement income, consider how your loved ones will be impacted if you’re leaving them an inheritance. We mentioned how a traditional 401(k)/IRA is tax-deferred. On the other hand, a Roth 401(k)/IRA growth is tax-free.

That means that you’re paying the tax up front, but you’re getting tax-free growth and tax-free distributions with Roth accounts. In years when you might have more income, a Roth conversion might make sense so you can take advantage of the tax-free growth when you need income down the road.

Also, it’s crucial to compare today’s tax rates to future tax rates. Did you know that tax rates will go up in 2026 if Congress doesn’t make changes between now and then? The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2025, which means tax rates would revert to the higher rates from 2017. Many provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including the current tax rates, could be permanently or temporarily extended. But are you prepared for the possibility of that not happening?

This fluid situation is one of many reasons why it’s important to have a CPA and other tax professionals as a part of your financial planning team. It’s important to work with a tax professional who is focused on creating a multi-year tax strategy that may help you reduce taxation over your lifetime rather than on a year-by-year basis.

7. Make Sure You Have Proper Risk Management

When you think of risk management, what comes to mind? Some people might immediately think about risk management in their underlying investments to help shield themselves against potential loss and volatility. Factoring in risk management as a part of your fluid investment strategy is critical.

However, that’s just one component of having proper risk management. What happens if your house burns down, you get into a car accident, or you need to have an extended stay in the hospital? Are all your insurance policies up to date? And do your insurance coverages adequately meet your specific needs?

So many people think that they can’t retire until 65 because that’s when they become eligible for Medicare. Well, if that’s the only reason you’re waiting to retire, have you done some of the previous steps? Maybe you have enough retirement income and can afford to go to the marketplace or elsewhere for health insurance. Just know that you do have options and that you might not need to keep working.

Along with reviewing your health insurance, make sure that your property and casualty insurance, home insurance, car insurance, etc. are up to date as well. Additionally, are you planning to carry life insurance into retirement? There are pros and cons to doing so, but it depends on your situation.

8. Have a Plan for When You’re Gone

If you said earlier that your family is important to you, you’ll likely want to incorporate legacy planning into your spending plan. There are two important components to this. First, you need to have a plan for if your spouse passes away before you and vice versa. How will the surviving spouse be impacted? Second, you need a plan for where your money will go once you and your spouse pass away. Will it go to the next generation, to your favorite charities, or both?

Knowing that your loved ones are in good hands financially can bring you peace of mind later in life. Remember that you don’t have to give with cold hands either. You can set up your spending plan in a way where you can gift money to your loved ones or charity while you’re still living. Start thinking about that pre-retirement because life is short. Make sure to regularly review your estate plan with your loved ones so that there are no surprises once you’re gone.

We Can Help You with These Pre-Retirement Tasks

There is so much to consider pre-retirement, but we hope that these pre-retirement tasks can help. That’s why you need to start planning for it—ideally 10-15 years prior to when you want to retire. Our team of professionals is ready to help you with that.

We want to build a plan that’s unique to you and your spouse. Start a conversation with our team to get started with these pre-retirement tasks. We look forward to helping you build a plan that’s tailored to your unique goals.

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The views expressed represent the opinion of Modern Wealth Management a Registered Investment Advisor. Information provided is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice. Modern Wealth Management does not accept any liability for the use of the information discussed. Consult with a qualified financial, legal, or tax professional prior to taking any action.