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The first five years of retirement are the most important and the most fragile years of your entire financial life. What you do or don't do during this window can make or break your long-term retirement success. So today we're going to walk through the five key financial moves, tax planning opportunities, and common pitfalls to avoid in the first five years of retirement. I'm Kerry Green, financial advisor and co-founder of Greenera Financial, and I help people close to or in retirement to get the most out of life with their money. So let's get into it. The first thing to do is to plan for something called sequence of returns risk. One of the biggest risks in early retirement is something called sequence of returns risk. This is the risk of experiencing a market downturn in the first few years of taking withdrawals from your portfolio. If your portfolio goes down and you're also withdrawing money from it, those losses are compounded and it's much harder for your portfolio to recover, which can dramatically shorten how long your money lasts. One of the biggest things we need to cover. So here's an example. Imagine two retirees, both with one million dollars. One retirees in a bull market and earns positive returns early on. The other retirees into a bear market and loses 20% in the first year, then 10% in the second. Even if the average return over 30 years is the same for both of them, the one who started with early losses while withdrawing income could run out of money 10 years earlier than the other. That's why it's so important to have a clear strategy for where to pull income from during down markets. Whether that's cash reserves, short-term bonds, or a conservative income bucket. Having two to three years of income in safe, non-volatile assets can act as a buffer and give your growth investments time to recover. The second thing to do is to build a withdrawal plan. Don't just wing it. Retirement is when you start spending the money you've worked so hard to save, but many retirees don't have a clear withdrawal plan. They just wing it, taking money as needed without a coordinated strategy. Instead, map out your income by account type, taxable brokerage, IRAs and 401Ks, and Roth accounts. Build a plan that accounts for when to tap which accounts, how much to withdraw, and how to minimize taxes along the way. And here's why it matters. Let's say you need $80,000 per year and you have a mix of taxable traditional IRA and Roth IRA funds. If you pull $80,000 from your IRA, you might owe 15 to 20% in taxes, lose eligibility for certain tax credits and trigger Medicare surcharges. But if you pull 30,000 from taxable accounts, 30,000 from your IRA and 20,000 from your Roth, you could reduce your tax bill by thousands of dollars and stay below key income thresholds. A good withdrawal plan isn't just about how much you withdraw. It's about where you withdraw it from and when. The third thing to do is to plan around social security and Medicare timing. Many retirees don't start taking social security or Medicare right away, but the timing matters more than people think. Delaying social security can increase your benefits by up to 8% per year, past full retirement age, up to age 70. That's a guaranteed return of almost 24% by waiting a few short years and it helps protect the surviving spouse with a higher benefit too. But the big issue with delaying your social security to get a larger benefit is that you might have to fill that income gap from somewhere else, usually your portfolio, which increases your potential taxable withdrawals. At the same time, Medicare starts at age 65, but your premiums are based on your income from two years prior. So what you earn at age 63 affects what you'll pay at 65. So here's the planning opportunity. If you retire at 62 and have low income for a few years, you could reduce your future Medicare premiums while building flexibility into your social security strategy. But it takes careful planning to coordinate withdrawals, conversions and benefits. The fourth thing to do is to consider Roth conversions in the tax sweet spot years. The years right after retirement and before RMD start at age 73 can be the best time to do Roth conversions. If your income is low, you may be able to convert money from traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs at a much lower tax rate. So let's say you're married, recently retired and have $50,000 in taxable income. You could convert an additional $40,000 from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA and still stay in the 12% federal tax bracket. That $40,000 is now growing tax-free for life and you've reduced the size of your future RMDs. Now done strategically over a few years, Roth conversions can lower your lifetime tax bill, reduce future Medicare premiums and give you more tax-free income flexibility in your 70s and beyond. This is one of the most overlooked strategies and easily one of the most powerful. And finally, the fifth thing to do is to reevaluate risk and spending plans. When you stop earning a paycheck, your relationship with risk changes and so should your investment strategy. The goal isn't to eliminate risk but to align your risk level with your new priorities, generating income, preserving capital and supporting your lifestyle. Rebalancing your portfolio to match your retirement goals may involve shifting from a growth-heavy allocation to a more income-focused one. That could mean more dividends, more bonds or more cash equivalents depending on your situation. Spending also deserves a fresh look. Many retirees frontload their spending, traveling, remodeling, or helping family in their early years. And that's okay as long as it's part of a long-term plan that accounts for how spending might decline later or increase due to health care. A detailed spending plan helps ensure you don't overspend in the early years and leave yourself vulnerable in the later ones. So the first five years of retirement are crucial. It's where foundational decisions get made and the stakes are pretty high. But the good news with proactive planning, smart tax moves, and a clear income strategy, you can set yourself up for decades of financial security and the ability to sleep well at night. So if you'd like help building your retirement roadmap, feel free to visit us at greenarifinancial.com or reach out to me directly anytime. I'm always happy to help if I can. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.