If you are within five years of retirement and thinking about paying off your mortgage, you are asking the right question, but… you’re probably asking it the wrong way.

In this episode, Brett walks through a sample client household, Imani, a 60-year-old nurse practitioner retiring in December with $1.7 million in her 403(b) and a $228,000 mortgage. Her plan was simple: pull the money from her retirement account and walk into retirement debt-free. 

Brett shows why that one decision would have cost her roughly $190,000 in taxes, lost growth, and destroyed planning runway, and the three moves that got her to the same outcome for about $9,000 instead.

Brett covers:

• Why the mortgage rate versus investment return comparison is the wrong framework for most CRNAs and NPs
• The four separate tax bills hiding inside a single 403(b) withdrawal, and why almost nobody adds them up
• Why January of your first retirement year is the worst possible time to make this decision
• The three-move mortgage payoff runway that keeps retirement accounts untouched and the ACA planning window intact
• How Imani went from a $190,000 mistake to a $9,000 solution without changing her goal at all

#CRNAs #NursePractitioners #RetirementPlanning #TaxPlanning #MortgagePlanning

Key Timestamps: 

(0:18) Financial risks of pulling from pre-tax accounts for mortgage payoffs 

(1:23) Case study introduction of a nurse practitioner aiming for debt-free retirement 

(2:33) Breakdown of how the wrong asset source creates a major planning mistake 

(4:33) Failure of standard rate versus return comparisons for pre-tax accounts 

(6:38) Four separate financial liabilities triggered by a single lump sum withdrawal 

(8:13) Delayed impact of retirement account liquidations on future Medicare surcharges 

(10:28) Heightened compounding dangers of large early retirement lump sum distributions 

(11:43) Preservation of the low tax window for strategic Roth conversions 

(13:03) Alternative approach using accelerated principal payments from current cash flow 

(14:53) Structural benefits of utilizing a five to seven-year payoff runway 

(16:00) Mathematical guidelines for evaluating mortgage payoff choices based on interest rates 

(18:03) Protecting retirement accounts from accelerated debt elimination plans

For more information and resources related to this episode, please visit the show notes.