Your 60s are the decade when retirement stops being a concept and becomes a set of decisions — about work, income, taxes and healthcare — that are difficult or impossible to reverse. The good news is that a handful of well-timed moves in this decade can add real security for the thirty years that follow. Financial planners return to the same five strategies again and again, because they work regardless of whether your savings are modest or substantial.
1. Get the Timing of Social Security Right
The single biggest lever most people control is when to claim Social Security. Claiming at 62 locks in a permanently reduced benefit; waiting until 70 increases it by roughly 8% for each year of delay past full retirement age. For healthy people with longevity in the family, delaying is often the cheapest “annuity” available anywhere — guaranteed, inflation-adjusted income for life. The right answer depends on health, work and a spouse’s record, so model it rather than guessing. The Social Security Administration provides calculators to compare claiming ages with your own earnings record.
2. Build a Deliberate Income Plan
A portfolio is not a pay cheque. Before retiring, map which accounts fund which years: taxable accounts first in many cases, then tax-deferred, keeping Roth assets for later years and legacy goals. Planners often suggest holding one to two years of spending in cash-like reserves so a market drop early in retirement does not force selling investments at lows — the sequence-of-returns risk that does outsized damage in the first retirement decade. More step-by-step guidance is collected in our money guides.
3. Use the Low-Income Years for Tax Moves
The years between stopping work and starting required minimum distributions and Social Security are a golden tax window. Income is temporarily low, which makes partial Roth conversions unusually cheap: moving money from traditional accounts into a Roth at low rates today can cut lifetime taxes and future required distributions significantly. This is also the moment to harvest capital gains at favourable rates and to tidy up concentrated stock positions.
4. Decide the Healthcare Bridge Before You Need It
Retiring before 65 means funding health insurance until Medicare begins — a cost that sinks many early-retirement plans when it is estimated casually. Price marketplace plans or COBRA honestly, factor in how income affects subsidies, and do not forget long-term care: your 60s are the last decade when insurance for it is comparatively affordable. Resources from AARP’s money section walk through the Medicare timing traps, including the penalties for late enrolment.
5. Put the Paperwork in Order
Finally, the unglamorous move that protects everything else: update wills, beneficiaries, powers of attorney and healthcare directives, and make sure someone you trust knows where things are. Your 60s are when estate documents stop being hypothetical. Do these five things deliberately, and the decade becomes what it should be — not a countdown, but a launchpad.
A Note on Sequencing
The order of these moves matters almost as much as the moves themselves. Social Security timing interacts with the tax window: delaying benefits while converting retirement savings to Roth accounts in low-income years is the classic one-two combination of the decade, and it works best when planned before the last pay cheque, not after. Healthcare decisions gate everything else, because an uninsured gap year or a missed Medicare deadline can consume the savings the other moves create. And the paperwork move should not wait for the others to finish — documents protect you during the planning, not just after it. None of this requires wealth; it requires calendar awareness. The sixties are a decade of windows, each open for a while and then shut. Work through the five moves deliberately, ideally with a fiduciary adviser reviewing the interactions, and you convert the most decision-dense decade of your financial life from a hazard into an advantage.