Every moment is an opportunity to refocus and take meaningful steps toward your goals. While many people concentrate on personal or professional growth, your retirement plan deserves the same level of attention and dedication. After all, the decisions you make today shape the retirement lifestyle you’ll enjoy tomorrow.

Let’s explore five key steps that can transform your retirement planning in 2025, helping you move from simply accumulating wealth to strategically preparing for the golden years you’ve dreamed of.

1. Shift Your Mindset from Growth to Protection

If you’re like many of our clients, you’ve spent years maximizing your retirement contributions and focusing on portfolio growth. As you transition to retirement, your focus should be about protecting those gains. This doesn’t mean abandoning growth entirely, but rather taking a more balanced approach.

Making this shift is crucial because when you’re near or in retirement, you no longer have decades to recover from significant market downturns. A major market correction just before or early in retirement can dramatically impact your long-term financial security, forcing you to withdraw from depleted accounts and potentially jeopardizing your retirement lifestyle.

To begin this transition effectively, review your asset management strategy and risk exposure, protecting against sequence of returns risk early in retirement, planning your retirement income streams, and considering how much of your portfolio should shift to preservation. We typically recommend starting this transition 5-10 years before your target retirement date to give yourself more flexibility and options.

2. Optimize Your Tax Position

Tax planning becomes even more critical as you approach retirement. For example, pulling income from the right accounts at the right time can help you stay in lower tax brackets throughout retirement.

Here’s what comprehensive tax management looks like:

• Creating a multi-year tax optimization strategy
• Evaluating strategic Roth conversion opportunities based on your unique situation
• Planning proactively for Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
• Structuring your retirement accounts for tax-efficient withdrawals
• Coordinating retirement income sources to manage tax brackets effectively

You might be leaving thousands of dollars on the table each year that you could instead be enjoying in retirement as you wish — tax management can help you secure that money.

3. Design Your Retirement Income Strategy

Creating reliable retirement income isn’t just about how much you’ve saved – it’s about how you’ll turn those savings into dependable income for your wishes, wants, and needs.

Income needs often follow a predictable pattern: higher in early retirement when you’re more active, then leveling off before potentially increasing again for healthcare costs.

To build a reliable income strategy, you need to:

• Calculate your expected retirement expenses
• Identify guaranteed income sources (Social Security, annuities, pensions, and more)
• Plan for rising healthcare costs and long-term care needs
• Create a sustainable withdrawal strategy
• Build in flexibility for unexpected expenses

4. Adjust Your Investment Approach

Your needs will change at different times in your life and your investment strategy should evolve to always reflect them, especially as you near retirement.

As professionals who practice The Bucket Plan®, we can help you focus on the fundamentals:

• Reassessing your risk tolerance based on income needs
• Diversifying your income sources
• Considering adding protection products where appropriate
• Balancing growth potential with asset preservation
• Planning for different market scenarios

5. Build a Strategic Distribution Framework

Instead of treating your retirement savings as one pool of money, we like to organize it based on when you’ll need it. This is where a tool like The Bucket Plan® becomes invaluable.

Picture your retirement money divided into three strategic groups:

Your Now Bucket

1. • Holds 1-2 years of expenses
   • Keeps your immediate needs secure
   • Provides peace of mind during market volatility

Your Soon Bucket

1. • Covers years 3-10 of retirement
   • Balances modest growth with stability
   • Bridges any gap during market downturns

Your Later Bucket

1. • Focuses on long-term growth
   • Helps combat inflation
   • Provides legacy planning opportunities

Consider The Bucket Plan® Solution as Your Resolution

Our clients love The Bucket Plan® because it helps solve one of the biggest retirement challenges: knowing exactly where your money will come from throughout retirement. It provides:

• Clear separation of money based on timeline
• Protection against having to sell investments in down markets
• Confidence in your long-term plan
• Flexibility to adjust as needs change

As financial advisors, we’ve guided many successful professionals through retirement transitions that truly transformed their financial future. What we’ve learned is that meaningful change requires more than just motivation – it needs a strategic approach, especially when you’re within sight of retirement. That’s when protecting and optimizing your wealth becomes crucial to your long-term success, and we use The Bucket Plan® to help you do so.

Your Next Step

As you plan, consider how these strategies align with your retirement goals. If you’re within 10 years of retirement, now is the ideal time to ensure your strategy addresses all these critical areas.

Book a free call with our team at Intelliplan Financial to learn how you can put these strategies and concepts into action. We’ll help you create a personalized bucket plan that gives you clarity and confidence in your retirement strategy.

Disclosure: Financial Planning and Advisory Services are offered through Prosperity Capital Advisors (“PCA”), an SEC-registered investment adviser.  Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Intelliplan Financial and PCA are separate, non-affiliated entities. PCA does not provide tax or legal advice. Insurance services offered through Intelliplan Financial are not affiliated with PCA.