Retiring soon, or recently retired? Let’s turn your savings into a paycheck.

The good news is that you can get a real answer, and it won’t come from your account balance alone. Two couples with $1 million each can get very different answers, depending on when they take Social Security, whether they have a pension, what they really spend each month, and how much of that million the IRS will tax on the way out.

So I start with your actual spending and income, year by year, and then test the plan against three kinds of trouble: a bad market in your first few years of retirement, higher inflation than expected, and an expensive health or long-term care event later in life. If the plan holds up through all three, you’ll have a pretty clear answer, and if it doesn’t, we’ll know what needs to change.

You can start anywhere from 62 to 70, and for every year you wait, the check gets larger, up until 70. Waiting isn’t always the right call, though, because it depends on your health, your other savings, your taxes, and, if you’re married, which of you has the larger benefit.

That last part matters more than a lot of couples realize. When one spouse passes away, the survivor typically keeps the larger of the two checks, so the higher earner’s decision about when to start usually decides what the survivor lives on, sometimes for decades. I run the numbers both ways, for both of you.

The usual rule of thumb is taxable accounts first, then your IRA and 401(k), and your Roth last. It’s a reasonable place to start, but it’s often not the best order, and the reason has to do with how tax brackets work.

So picture your tax brackets as a row of buckets. Every January, your income starts filling the first bucket, which is taxed at 10%, and once that one fills up and overflows, the next dollars spill into the 12% bucket, and so on. That means only your last dollars get taxed at your highest rate, instead of all of them.

In the early years of retirement, it usually makes sense to pull a little from more than one type of account each year, filling the low buckets on purpose and stopping before you spill into a much higher one. The order you choose in those first few years adds up over the next 20 or 30, and two couples with the same savings and the same spending can end up paying very different amounts in tax.

So just picture your retirement savings parked in two garages. The first is your traditional IRA or 401(k), and when you parked money there, the IRS agent at the door gave you a tax break. When you pull money back out in retirement, though, the agent writes down every dollar and adds it to your taxable income.

The second garage is a Roth IRA. You got no tax break going in, but when you pull money out, the agent gives you a free pass, and none of it gets taxed, assuming you’ve met a few qualifications. A Roth conversion is moving some money from the first garage to the second, so you pay the tax at the door now, and in exchange, that money can come out tax-free later.

Now this is obviously a simplified picture, but that’s the gist of it. Conversions often make sense if you retire before 70 and have a large traditional IRA. The years between your last paycheck and your required withdrawals, which start at 73 or 75 depending on the year you were born, are often some of your lowest-tax years.

How much to convert matters even more than whether to convert, since a conversion adds to your income that year and can raise your Medicare premiums two years later. So I plan conversions one year at a time, up to a specific tax bracket.

The first step is deciding what that money is for. Money you’ll spend in the next year or two belongs somewhere safe, like cash, a CD, or a money market account, and the exact rate usually matters less than people think.

Money you won’t touch for ten years or more has a different job. Over that long, rising prices slowly shrink what each dollar can buy, and since a CD balance doesn’t drop the way a stock fund can, that loss never shows up on your statement, even though it’s very real.

A lot of people moved savings into CDs when rates were near 5%, which was a sound decision at the time, but it usually wasn’t meant to be permanent.

This is one of the risks I plan around most carefully, and it has a technical name, sequence of returns risk. The same average return, in a different order, can mean money that lasts 30 years or money that runs out in 18, because a bad stretch early in retirement hits while you’re taking money out.

The good news is that the fix doesn’t depend on predicting the market. We keep about one to three years of spending somewhere stable, so you’re not forced to sell stocks during a downturn to pay for groceries, and we write down ahead of time when and how that reserve gets refilled, so the decision is made while everyone is calm.

Usually, yes, but it often takes a few changes first. The three gaps I see most often are a pension set up to pay only for the retiree’s lifetime because the check was bigger, a Social Security plan that leaves the survivor with a smaller check than necessary, and beneficiary forms that were filled out decades ago and never updated. Those forms override your will, so they matter more than most people expect.

I sit down with both of you and go through your own numbers, so you can see what would change and fix what needs fixing while there’s still time. If your spouse has already passed away, this page will be more helpful.