1. Fill up your lower brackets on purpose
If you’re sitting in the 12% bracket with room before the next one starts, that’s not a year to leave income on the table. Pulling extra from a traditional IRA up to the top of that bracket — and no further — locks in a low tax rate on money that would otherwise be taxed later at a rate you don’t control.
2. Convert to Roth in the gap years
The stretch between retiring and claiming Social Security, or between retiring and turning 73, is often the lowest-income window of your retirement. Converting traditional dollars to Roth during that window means paying tax at a lower rate than you likely will once RMDs and Social Security are both running.
3. Use a QCD instead of writing a check
If you’re 70½ or older and charitably inclined, a qualified charitable distribution sends money straight from your IRA to a charity — up to $111,000 in 2026 — and it counts toward your RMD without ever showing up as taxable income. Compare that to donating from your checking account after taking the RMD, where you pay tax on the withdrawal first and then need to itemize to get any benefit back.
4. Harvest gains, not just losses
In a year your taxable income lands in the 0% long-term capital gains bracket, selling appreciated investments and immediately rebuying them resets your cost basis at no tax cost. Most retirees only think about harvesting losses; harvesting gains in a low-income year is the quieter, equally useful version.
5. Sequence your withdrawals deliberately
Pulling from taxable accounts first, tax-deferred accounts second, and Roth accounts last is the default advice — and it’s often wrong for someone who will land in a much higher bracket later. Blending withdrawals across all three buckets every year, rather than draining them in strict order, tends to produce a smoother, lower lifetime tax bill.
6. Watch the IRMAA cliff before you act
Every strategy above can backfire if it pushes your income one dollar over an IRMAA threshold — $109,000 for a single filer or $218,000 for a married couple in 2026. Crossing that line doesn’t cost you a little; it adds the full next-tier surcharge for the entire year, on top of whatever income tax change you triggered.
7. Time large one-off events
Selling a rental property, exercising old stock options, or taking a lump-sum pension payout doesn’t have to happen the same year you start Social Security or your first RMD. Spreading a large event into a lower-income year, even by twelve months, can shift it into a meaningfully cheaper bracket.
