My sons’ soccer games used to provide me with informal investor focus groups. Roaming the sidelines, often with my father (and Nobel laureate economist), we fielded questions from parents about how to maximize their returns.

Today our kids are grown. Those encounters happen in other places around town. My fellow soccer parents are retiring, some earlier than planned, causing them to miss some of their potential peak earning years.

They are puzzled by the myriad decisions they face when approaching or in retirement, including choices about rollovers, Social Security filing, timing account withdrawals, required minimum distributions (RMDs) and Roth conversions.

In short, they need a decumulation plan. And that plan must benefit from decumulation technology that my colleague Steve Zuschin notes needs to be as powerful and responsive as Waze (or Google Maps or Apple Maps) are in helping drivers navigate to their destinations. 

People become vulnerable to costly mistakes as they face retirement. How will you steward them through decumulation?

First, stay in touch and urge financial plans be updated. Clients in their 50s think about retirement every day. And as they move closer to embarking on their next chapter, be sure to stay in touch on what they are thinking regarding their retirement. Often, they just need to talk to a trusted source. With so many issues to consider, they don’t fully understand the consequences of decisions—particularly when it comes to their tax situation.

Remind them that any change in their financial situation—job change, death, disability due to illness, divorce—should trigger a call to you. And most important of all, be sure to suggest you work with them to update their financial plans. The world has changed and their plan needs to consider the entire household portfolio, including assets held by spouses or partners (here’s why that’s important).

Technology can capture all their portfolio assets and beyond – real estate, insurance and annuity contracts, cryptocurrency. You’ll need all that information to chart their course until retirement and create a personalized decumulation plan.

Learn the practices that will allow you to deliver maximum income. Ask anybody about the risks in retirement, and they’re likely to say it’s outliving their assets because of ill health, inflation and longevity. Many are surprised to learn that taxes are, in fact, the most significant cost—and threat—to retirement income. 

Achieving “tax alpha” and maximizing retirement income demands consistently applying the following practices across a household portfolio:
1. Asset location—The most effective way to improve after-tax returns is in locating assets in the optimal accounts while maintaining the target asset allocation. This means, for example, locating tax-inefficient assets in tax-advantaged accounts, such as 401(k) plans or individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and tax-efficient assets in taxable accounts.

2. Tax-loss harvesting—This is a valuable tool in managing taxes, but the perception of its impact exceeds reality. The best way to improve after-tax returns is asset location. And asset location reduces how often tax-loss harvesting is necessary.

3. Tax-aware transitions—As investors consolidate accounts and align their portfolios with their target asset allocations, they must make trades. Decisions about what assets to sell and buy will tax consequences that they (and you) must consider in the context of the household portfolio to get the best results.

4. Optimizing Social Security benefits—The government provides an 8% bonus each year from a beneficiary’s full retirement age to age 70 for deferring Social Security benefits. It’s free money. And it’s critical to time Social Security benefits with the other moving parts I’m describing here. Here’s how to talk about this with clients.

5. Roth IRA conversions—Investors tend to benefit from lower tax brackets when they stop earning wages and begin to draw their income from other sources. Many can take advantage of Roth conversions to lower their tax liability if they choose the right time.

6. Required minimum distributions (RMDs)—The government says you must withdraw a portion of your tax-advantaged savings at a certain age. Investors need your help timing and coordinating RMDs within their households—and determining what to do with withdrawals, they don’t immediately need income.

7. Multi-account household rebalancing—Portfolios inevitably veer from their target asset allocations. The best way to right those ships is tax-smart, household-level, multi-account rebalancing.

8. Retirement income sourcing—Withdrawing or selling assets willy-nilly is a sure-fire way to spend more in taxes and have less income. Maximizing retirement income requires coordinating asset location, Roth conversions, tax-loss harvesting, tax-aware transitions, household rebalancing, and sequencing RMDs, Social Security filing, pension, and annuity income.

An independent analysis by EY confirmed the value of my tax-efficient methodology to investing and retirement income sourcing. Evaluating a hypothetical household of two 50-year-olds with $1 million in assets, EY found that applying practices to maximize tax efficiency produced a 40% decrease in taxes, 33% more retirement income and 45% increase in bequests.

When it’s time for decumulation, embrace technology. The financial plan is the road map when it comes to retirement income. Dynamic decumulation technology is Waze. We know that 10,000 to 12,000 people turn 65 every single day. Have you found the “Waze for retirement income” in your firm’s app store?

Paul R. Samuelson is the chief investment officer and co-founder of LifeYield.