Every date on this sheet is written into US statute. None of it depends on your salary, your balance, or the market — only on the year you were born. Two of these windows close behind you, and one of them is a trapdoor you can shut permanently by accident.
Separate from your employer in or after the calendar year you turn 55 and you may draw from that employer's plan penalty-free. Move it into an IRA and the right is gone permanently — IRAs have no rule of 55, so you wait until 59½. It also covers only the plan you just left, not older plans elsewhere.
SECURE 2.0 grants a larger catch-up limit in the calendar years you turn 60, 61, 62 and 63 — then it reverts to the ordinary catch-up at 64. It is the only contribution window on this sheet that shuts behind you. Four years, then gone.
IRMAA runs on a two-year lookback. A large Roth conversion in the year you turn 63 raises your premiums at 65 — per person, for the whole year. Plan conversions around 63, not around 65, and remember a couple pays the surcharge twice.
You cannot contribute to an HSA once enrolled in any part of Medicare. If you enrol after 65, Part A is backdated up to six months, which can retroactively disqualify contributions you already made. Stop HSA contributions six months before you enrol.
Claim before full retirement age and keep working, and benefits are withheld above an earnings threshold. The withheld amount is not lost — your benefit is recomputed upward at FRA — but the cash flow disappears in the meantime, which surprises people who planned around it.
Delayed retirement credits accrue at roughly 8% a year from full retirement age, and stop dead at 70. Every month you wait beyond your seventieth birthday is a month of benefit forgone with no increase to show for it. There is no reason to delay past 70.
The ages on this sheet — 50, 55, 59½, 60–63, 62, 65, your full retirement age, 70, 70½, your RMD age — are fixed in law and change only when Congress acts. SECURE 2.0 moved several of them recently, which is why RMDs now start at 73 or 75 depending on your birth year rather than the 70½ that applied for decades.
The dollar amounts attached to them are a different matter and are deliberately not plotted here: catch-up limits, the IRMAA thresholds, the Social Security earnings test, and the QCD cap all re-index annually. Treat any figure you carry away from this sheet as needing a check against the current year's tables.
The band drawn in solid ink is not legislation, it is arithmetic: the years between retiring and the first income the government forces on you, whichever of Social Security or RMDs arrives first. In that window your taxable income can be near zero, which makes it the cheapest time you will ever have to convert pre-tax money to Roth, or to realise capital gains inside the 0% bracket.
It is also the window that the IRMAA lookback quietly overlaps from 63 onward. Those two facts pull in opposite directions, and reconciling them is the single most valuable planning conversation available in your sixties.