retirees tax bracket

        And Mary Kay Foss, a director at Sweeney Kovar and an instructor for the CalCPA Education Foundation, added: “Generally retirees are in the same tax bracket as when they were working, but now they have the risk of perhaps being in a higher tax bracket,” she said.

Michael Jackson, a partner with Grant Thornton, and a leader of the firm’s private wealth services team, agreed that retirees and would-be retirees have to do what some describe as income-tax bracket planning, but they also have to worry about losing the value of some of their deductions.

“A lot of retirees are going to have to do a lot more planning for what income they want to have at each given year,” Jackson said. By managing their distributions the can avoid having their deduction be worth less or paying taxes at a higher rate, he said.

To be fair, Jackson said retirees and would-be need to coordinate their distributions so that they are tax efficient but not so much that you’re letting the “tax tail lead the dog.”