You spent 40 years learning how to put money into retirement accounts.
Nobody taught you how to take it out.
And that is strange, because the taking out part has a bigger effect on your lifetime tax bill than almost anything you did on the way in. The order you tap your accounts can swing six figures across a retirement. Same portfolio. Same spending. Different sequence.
The advice everyone repeats is simple and clean: taxable first, then traditional, then Roth.
It is not wrong exactly. It is just the beginner version, and for a large number of retirees it quietly produces the worst possible outcome.
The standard withdrawal order optimizes for this year. The correct one optimizes for the next thirty. Those are very different plans.
Let us go find the six figures.