Six moves worth making before Q4: revisit your retirement income plan, rebalance your portfolio, model Roth conversions, check your RMDs and tax-loss harvesting opportunities, update your estate and beneficiary details, and sit down for a mid-year review with your advisor. Doing all six now, rather than in the scramble of December, is what actually separates retirement income planning from a New Year’s resolution.
The back half of the year has two hard deadlines built into it: Roth conversions and most RMDs are due December 31, with no extension into the following spring. Mid-year is early enough to act deliberately on both, instead of under pressure. Here’s the full checklist, expanded one item at a time.
1. Revisit Your Retirement Income Plan
Retirement income planning isn’t a one-time exercise; it’s a number you check at least once a year, and mid-year is the natural point to do it. Confirm two things: is your withdrawal rate still realistic given how your portfolio has moved, and has your actual spending tracked the plan or drifted from it?
If you built your plan around a safe withdrawal rate retirement research suggests is sustainable, mid-year is the point to confirm the assumption still holds, not to panic over six months of normal market movement, but to catch a real drift before it compounds into next year’s number. If you haven’t worked out that number in the first place, this retirement framework walks through it. This is also a good moment to check whether any guaranteed income sources changed, a pension start date, a Social Security claim, or a part-time income you didn’t expect to still have, since retirement income planning has to account for the whole picture, not just the portfolio in isolation.
2. Rebalance and Review Your Risk
Markets rarely move evenly across asset classes, which means a portfolio that started the year at a 60/40 split rarely stays there without help. A mid-year check catches allocation drift while it’s still a small adjustment rather than a large one.
This is also the moment to ask a harder question: does your current risk level still match your actual timeline? Someone two years from retirement should be asking that question more urgently than someone still a decade out.
3. Plan Roth Conversions Before Year-End
Mid-year is the ideal window for Roth conversion strategies, for a simple reason: by July, you have a reasonably clear picture of your full-year income, which means you can estimate which tax bracket you’ll land in and how much room is left in it before converting more would push you into the next one.
Unlike an IRA contribution, a Roth conversion has to be completed by December 31 of the tax year, there’s no extension into the following spring. Waiting until November to think about it means making the decision under time pressure with much less clarity on the full-year picture. Modeling it in July or August, instead, gives you room to convert deliberately, in the amount that actually makes sense for the bracket you’re in.
This is one of the clearest examples of tax-efficient retirement planning in action: converting a manageable slice of a traditional IRA in a year when your income happens to be lower can shrink the required minimum distributions, and the tax bill that comes with them, you’d otherwise face a decade from now.
4. Check RMDs and Tax-Loss Harvesting Opportunities
If you’re required to take a required minimum distribution this year, mid-year is the point to confirm the amount, not December; the IRS penalty for missing an RMD deadline is steep, and waiting until the last two weeks of the year to calculate it leaves no room for a mistake. Current RMD tax strategies worth reviewing at this point include which accounts to draw the distribution from first, whether a qualified charitable distribution makes sense if you’re charitably inclined, and how the distribution interacts with everything else on this list; a large RMD can push you out of the tax bracket you were counting on for a Roth conversion.
This is also a natural point to look for tax-loss harvesting opportunities, selling an underperforming position to realize a loss that can offset gains elsewhere, while being mindful of the wash-sale rule if you plan to buy back into a similar position. Doing this mid-year, rather than in a year-end rush, gives you more positions to choose from and more time to execute the trade properly. Between the RMD timing and the harvesting window, this single checklist item does more for tax-efficient retirement planning than almost anything else on this list.
5. Update Estate and Beneficiary Details
A death, birth, marriage, or divorce in the family changes who should be named on an account, and beneficiary designations override what a will says; a mismatch between the two is one of the most common and most avoidable estate-planning mistakes. Mid-year is a good time to pull your actual beneficiary forms and confirm they still reflect your intentions, not just assume they do.
It’s also worth confirming that any trust funding is current if your estate plan relies on one, and that the people named as agents under a power of attorney or healthcare directive are still the right choices.
6. Meet With Your Fiduciary Advisor for a Mid-Year Review
Each of the five moves above is worth doing on its own, but they’re worth doing together even more; a Roth conversion decision affects your RMDs, which affects your tax bracket, which affects whether tax-loss harvesting makes sense this year. A coordinated mid-year review is where those connections actually get made, instead of five separate decisions made in isolation by five different people or apps.
Schedule Your Mid-Year Review
A checklist gets you started; a fiduciary advisor is what turns six separate decisions into one coordinated plan before Q4 closes the window on several of them. If you’re looking for a retirement planner near you who can walk through all six moves in a single conversation. Request an Appointment with Peak American; the first conversation is complimentary, and it comes with no obligation.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should I do a mid-year review?
Anywhere from June through August works well, early enough that you still have a full year’s income picture forming, and early enough to act on Roth conversions and tax-loss harvesting before the December 31 deadlines that govern both.
What tax moves have deadlines this year?
Roth conversions must be completed by December 31 of the tax year, with no extension into the following spring. RMDs are generally due by December 31 as well, except for the first RMD in the year you reach RMD age, which can be delayed to April 1 of the following year.
Do I need to do all six moves every year?
Yes, at least as a check. Even a year with no life changes and no market surprises is worth confirming, since “nothing changed” is useful information for retirement income planning, not a reason to skip the review.