I'll be honest with you: I love a good plan. Ask anyone who's ever gone rock climbing with me, and they’ll tell you I'm the guy triple-checking the harness before we leave the ground. Not because I don't trust the equipment, but because the whole point of good gear is that you never have to think about it once you're on the wall. You just climb.
Retirement planning works the same way. And if you're somewhere in that 5-to-10-year stretch before you plan to retire, you're standing at the base of the wall right now.This is exactly the moment to check the harness.
Here's the thing about this particular window: it's the one stretch of your financial life where you still have room to make real adjustments, but you're close enough to retirement that those adjustments actually count. Tenyears out, small course corrections can make a meaningful difference. Two years out, your options start to narrow. So, if you're in the 5–10-year zone, congratulations!You have more leverage right now than you'll ever have again before you retire. Let's make sure you're using it.
Why This Window Is Different from Every Other Stage
Earlier in your career, the advice is pretty simple: save consistently, invest for growth, don't panic when the market dips. Good advice, but broad.
The 5–10 years before retirement are different because the questions get specific. Specific to your Social Security timing. Specific to your tax bracket in retirement versus now. Specific to whether your income sources will actually show up when and how you expect them to. This is the window where "someday" starts turning into "next Tuesday," and vague plans need to become real ones.
It's also the stretch where a few smart moves can genuinely change your outcome, and a few overlooked details can quietly work against you. Let's walk through the big ones.
1. Get Honest About Your Retirement Income Picture
Most people know roughly how much they've saved. Fewer people know how those savings actually translate into monthly income once paychecks stop.
This is the decade to build a real income projection—not a rough guess, but an actual plan that accounts for Social Security, pensions (if you have one), required withdrawals down the road, and how your investment accounts are structured to produce income rather than just grow. Retirement isn't the finish line where you stop managing money; it's the point where your money's job description changes from "grow" to "provide." That shift deserves real planning, not assumptions.
2. Revisit Your Investment Risk on Purpose, Not by Accident
If your portfolio hasn't been reviewed in a while, there's a decent chance it's still positioned the way it was 10 or 15 years ago, back when you had decades to recover from a bad market year.
That's not necessarily wrong, but it should be intentional. The years right before retirement are when a significant market downturn can do the most damage, simply because there's less time to recover before you start relying on that money. This doesn't mean going ultra-conservative overnight.It means making sure your risk level matches your timeline, rather than matching old habits.
3. Get Strategic About Taxes Now, Not Later
This is where being both a CFP® and a CPA comes in handy, because I see this mistake constantly: people treat taxes as a once-a-year, tax-season problem instead of an ongoing part of the plan.
The years just before retirement are often a sweet spot for tax-smart moves: think Roth conversions while you're still in a lower bracket than you might be after RMDs kick in, or strategically timing when you draw from different account types. The tax code doesn't care whether you've thought about this. But the difference between a tax-aware retirement and a tax-reactive one can add up to real money over 20or 30years of retirement.
4. Pressure-Test Your Social Security Strategy
Social Security feels simple: you turn a certain age, you start collecting a check.But the timing decision is one of the more consequential ones you'll make, and it's not one-size-fits-all. Claiming early versus waiting can mean a meaningfully different monthly benefit for the rest of your life, and the "right" answer depends on your health, your other income sources, whether you're married, and how you want to sequence your withdrawals overall.
This is a decision worth modeling out with real numbers, not oneyouguessatbased on what a coworker did.
5. Talk About the Life You Actually Want
Here's the part that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet but matters just as much: what are you retiring to? Not just what you're retiring from.
I ask clients this a lot, and the honest answer is usually still forming.And that's fine. But the 5–10-year window is the right time to start having that conversation with your spouse or partner, because it shapes real decisions: how much you'll need, when you can afford to retire, whether part-time work or a passion project fits into the picture. A plan built around a life you want tends to hold up a lot better than one built around a generic retirement number.
You Don't Need to Have All of This Figured Out Today
What you need is a plan that pulls these pieces together—income, investments, taxes, Social Security, and the actual life you're planning for—into one coherent strategy instead of five separate guesses.
That's the work we do together. If you're in this window and haven't had a real conversation about how these pieces fit, now's the time.Not because the sky is falling, but because this is the stretch where good planning pays off the most.
Ready to check your harness? Schedule a conversation with our team, andlet's make sure your plan is ready for what's next.