The order you draw from matters more than the return

Retirement income is a sequencing problem before it is an investment problem. Which account gets drawn first, when Social Security starts, whether to convert to Roth in the low-income years, and how RMDs land on top of it all: these decide the tax bill for the next twenty-five years.

We write the sequence down. Then we review it on a schedule, because the tax code and your life both change.