What traditional retirement accounts do and do not solve.
At a set age, the government makes you withdraw from your traditional 401(k) or IRA and pay tax on it, need it or not. What RMDs are, when they start, the ripple effect on your other income, and how to plan around them.
Cashing out a 401(k) early, or taking a big lump sum in retirement, can hand nearly half of it to taxes and penalties in one year. Exactly how the bill is built, and how the people who avoid it saw it coming.
A Roth conversion can be a brilliant tax move or an expensive mistake. The honest both-sides version: what it is, when it genuinely helps, when it backfires, and the assumption buried in every projection.
The honest accounting of what a 401(k) and IRA actually do: a savings tool mistaken for a retirement plan, the silent tax partner inside it, forced withdrawals, sequence risk, and the income piece it was never built to provide.