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My Next Move

The Tax You Postponed Is Compounding Too

Retirement Taxes

You spent thirty years deferring the tax. It spent thirty years compounding.

If most of your wealth sits in IRAs and 401(k)s, you own an asset with a silent partner. Required minimum distributions, IRMAA surcharges, the widow's penalty, a Roth conversion window that opens and closes with the calendar: this is the machinery of qualified money in retirement. Sequenced well, it's manageable. Left alone, it compounds against you.

Tax-deferred was the smart move. Everyone said so, and for decades they were right. But deferral is not forgiveness. It's a loan against your future brackets, and the balance has been compounding right alongside your account.

Now the pressure builds from every side. RMDs arrive whether you need the income or not. Each dollar can push you into a higher bracket, raise your Medicare premiums through IRMAA, and expose more of your Social Security to tax. The account you built for freedom starts dictating terms.

And the windows are closing. Roth conversion sweet spots live in the years between retirement and RMD age. Current rates carry sunset dates. A surviving spouse files single, in compressed brackets, on the same money. Every year without a sequencing decision is itself a decision.

You were told tax-deferred was the smart move. It was. And it isn't, anymore.
Eric Cooper, Founder

Why this doesn't solve in isolation

Retirement taxes touch every other move on the board. Work the account without working the sequence and you trade one problem for three.

Estate Taxes

Qualified balances compound inside your estate, and pre-tax dollars pass to heirs with the tax bill attached. Converted Roth assets pass cleaner.

Lifestyle Risk in Retirement

The number that funds your life is after-tax income, not the balance printed on the statement.

Capital Gains

Withdrawal order across taxable and qualified accounts changes your bracket and what your brokerage account owes. Sequence decides both.

Sooner's approach

We don't hand you a document and see you next year. Retirement-tax work at Sooner is real-time sequencing: brackets, conversions, and withdrawals managed year by year, as tax law and markets actually move.

Roth conversions run on a cadence, not a one-time event. Each year's amount is set against that year's bracket space, IRMAA thresholds, and market conditions, coordinated with your CPA so strategy and filing never contradict each other.

Continuous monitoring through Income Lab keeps household withdrawals, bracket management, and spending guardrails on one model. When conditions change, the sequence changes with them.

The cost of waiting

Every year of delay compounds the postponed tax. Every year spent at the top of an avoidable bracket leaves recoverable dollars on the table, and unlike markets, those don't come back.

The math is patient. The windows are not.

Ninety seconds tells you where to start.

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