Forget the textbook order
The standard advice says drain taxable accounts first, then tax-deferred accounts, then Roth last. It’s a reasonable starting point and a poor finishing one. Followed rigidly for twenty or thirty years, that order can leave a retiree with a single enormous traditional IRA balance by their mid-80s, forcing huge RMDs at exactly the point in life when they have the least ability to plan around them.
Why blending sources beats draining them in sequence
Withdrawing a mix from taxable, traditional, and Roth accounts every year — rather than fully emptying one bucket before touching the next — lets you control your taxable income with much finer precision. If you’re a few thousand dollars from the top of a tax bracket or an IRMAA threshold, you can pull that last bit from a Roth account instead of a traditional one and stay under the line. Strict sequencing removes that flexibility entirely.
The order that tends to work better
Start with required cash flow: Social Security, any pension, RMDs once they’re mandatory. Layer in taxable-account withdrawals up to the point where you’d otherwise spill into a higher bracket. Use traditional IRA withdrawals to fill the rest of your current bracket, deliberately — not by accident. Reserve Roth withdrawals for whatever’s left, or for any year where an unplanned expense would otherwise push you over a tax or IRMAA threshold.
Two things that change the math every single year
RMDs are not optional inputs to this plan — once they start at 73 or 75, depending on birth year, they’re the floor your other withdrawal decisions get built around. Medicare’s IRMAA cliff is the other constraint: crossing $109,000 in MAGI as a single filer or $218,000 as a couple in 2026 adds a real surcharge with no partial penalty, so a withdrawal plan has to check against that ceiling before finalizing the year’s numbers, not after.
Revisit it every year, not once
A withdrawal sequence built in your first year of retirement won’t fit your situation at 75. Account balances shift, tax law changes, and RMDs grow as a share of your traditional balance the older you get. Treat the sequence as something you re-check annually against that year’s brackets and thresholds, not a plan you set once and follow blindly for decades.
