The accumulation chapters built the engine. This one runs it in reverse, at the lowest lifetime tax cost the law allows. Most readers spend forty years optimizing inputs—contribution rates, asset allocation, fee drag—and then turn around at retirement, follow the default withdrawal order their brokerage suggests, and surrender a meaningful slice of the portfolio they spent their working life building. The defaults are wrong for you. They are designed for a household that runs out of money, not one that runs into cliffs.
What follows assumes you have already done the work of chapter “Tax Planning and Management”, chapter “Tax Advantaged Accounts”, and chapter “Retirement”, and that you arrive at retirement with three sources of capital: taxable brokerage, pre-tax retirement accounts, and tax-free Roth and HSA balances. The chapter is about choreography across those buckets, against Social Security, against the unavoidable Required Minimum Distributions (section “Required Minimum Distributions: Navigating the Maze”), and against a tax structure that has been carefully engineered to extract a higher rate from the unprepared.