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I’m full Italian. Italian-American, to be precise, which in my family means our entire culture orbits around food.
My grandfather, my dad’s dad, was the family chef until he passed when I was in elementary school. I have vivid memories of him standing over steaming pots. Pasta. Sauce. Homemade wine and olives. Pickled everything. Spreads that took up entire tables and counters.
One thing he was famous for was what we call “pizza bread.” Our family’s version of focaccia. This is not just any focaccia. This is a mouth-watering, your taste buds immediately crave it upon thought, kind of focaccia. Even writing about it now makes me want to break out the flour and olive oil. Pizza bread was the thing. The one that, when it showed up, meant something. When he passed, he took the recipe with him, or at least the version of it that actually worked.
My grandmother tried, for years, to recreate it. So did my uncle. Close, but not quite. Something was always a little off. The texture. The moisture. My Grandma accidentally putting cinnamon instead of pepper on it and our whole family eating it anyway, not wanting to offend her. (That is love, by the way. Or fear…It’s definitely one of those). We were missing the thing that made us say “yes, this is his recipe”.
Eventually my grandmother wrote down her version of the recipe and gave it to me. I followed it. I tweaked it. I tried again. And again. And again. I couldn’t get it right. The recipe wasn’t wrong, exactly. It just wasn’t landing the way I remembered it.
So one day I went down a research rabbit hole. I took my grandmother’s recipe, the one she’d carefully documented, and started layering in techniques I found elsewhere. Specific things about hydration, about how long to let the dough rest, about the exact thickness before it went in the oven. About when to add certain ingredients.
And then it happened. That’s it. That’s the bread. That’s what we’d all been missing.
The recipe my grandmother gave me wasn’t the problem. It was a real foundation, built from decades of watching him do it. What was missing wasn’t the recipe. It was knowing which techniques to layer in, and how far to take them, to get the result we’d actually been after the whole time.
Most Women I Talk to Have the Recipe
I think about this a lot, lately, sitting across the table from women who are retiring soon or close to it.
They have the recipe. They followed it for decades. Save into the 401(k). Don’t touch it. Increase the contribution when you get the raise. Let it ride through the dips. It’s good advice. It’s correct advice. And they did it, faithfully, for 20, 30 years.
The balance is often genuinely impressive.
But more and more, what I’m seeing is this: the recipe they followed gets them most of the way there, and then something is a little off. Not wrong. Just... not quite landing the way they pictured it would when they imagined “being set” for retirement.
A Balance Is Not a Paycheck
Here’s what’s usually off: almost everything they’ve built lives in one bucket. Tax-deferred accounts. The traditional 401(k), 403(b), etc. that will become a traditional IRA. Every dollar in there has never been touched by a tax bill, which means, eventually, it will be, on a schedule that isn’t really theirs.
That deferral was the right call during the high-earning years. I’m not walking that back. If you’re in a high tax bracket and deferring income, that’s money staying in your pocket instead of going to the IRS.
But at 73, the IRS stops letting you wait. Required Minimum Distributions kick in, whether you need the money that year or not. And if most of what you’ve built sits in that one place, those distributions can push you into a higher tax bracket in retirement than you’d planned for. They can trigger Medicare surcharges. They can make Social Security income taxable when it didn’t need to be.
The money is there. The technique for controlling how and when you use it, that’s the part that’s missing.
The Techniques Outside the Spotlight
This is not a lesson in saving more. Almost every woman I’m describing has saved plenty. It’s about where, and it comes down to three buckets, each with a different relationship to the IRS.
Tax-deferred is the one almost everyone has. 401(k)s, traditional IRAs, 403(b)s. A tax break now and a tax bill later, on every dollar, on the government’s timeline.
Tax-free is the one most people have barely touched, often because they assumed they made too much to qualify (there’s a workaround for that in some cases, by the way). Roth IRAs, Roth 401(k)s, HSAs invested rather than spent. Money that grows and comes out without the IRS ever getting another look.
Taxable is the one that gets built last, if at all. A regular brokerage account titled Individually, Jointly or in Trust. There are no penalties for using it early and no required withdrawals on someone else’s schedule. There are lower rates (capital gains taxes) on long-term growth and a whole lot of flexibility.
Most of the women I’m sitting with right now have a lot of bucket one, a little of bucket two, and a little in bucket three. Which means in retirement, nearly every dollar they touch gets taxed as ordinary income, on the IRS’s terms.
While the effort has been great, the recipe is missing a few techniques and tweaks that can make this into a more successful and fruitful outcome.
What This Actually Looks Like
A woman I’ll describe (a composite of conversations I’ve had more than once) is in her late 50s. She’s spent close to 30 years climbing in her field, and she’s done it well. Six-figure salary for most of that time, a healthy 401(k) she’s never stopped funding, and a paid-off house. By any measure, she did everything right.
When we sit down and map it out, here’s what it actually looks like: roughly 90% of her investable assets are in that 401(k), soon to roll into an IRA. She does have a Roth IRA, opened years ago and contributed to here and there. And she does have a taxable brokerage account, opened with good intentions. Both accounts exist. Both have been funded, at least a little, over the years.
But the Roth has maybe $40,000 in it. The brokerage account has roughly double that, call it $80,000. Compared to a 401(k) sitting at $1.5 million, both buckets are technically there and functionally empty. The accounts were opened. The habit of prioritizing them never quite formed, because the 401(k) had a match attached, a payroll deduction that happened automatically, and an immediate deduction that felt like the obvious place for every spare dollar to go.
This is the version of the problem I see most often. The ingredients are all in the kitchen. They’re just wildly out of proportion to each other, the way a recipe technically has flour, water, and salt, but if the ratio is off by a factor of ten, it doesn’t matter that all three ingredients are present.
Now she’s a few years from retiring, and the conversation shifts. If she wants to take a few months off before she fully retires, $40,000 and $80,000 will cover some of that, but not much, and once it’s gone, every remaining option runs back through bucket one. If she wants to help her daughter with a down payment, does she pull from the brokerage account (manageable) or the 401(k) (an ordinary-income tax bill on top of whatever else is happening that year)? If she wants a year of travel before Medicare and Social Security kick in, those smaller buckets could bridge the gap, if they were big enough. Right now, they’re not.
The honest answer, with the recipe she has right now, is: the flexibility exists in theory, but not yet at a scale that actually changes her decisions.
None of this means she’s behind. It means there’s a version of the next five to ten years where she keeps building bucket one as needed, but deliberately tips more of the new money toward the other two, layer by layer (a Roth conversion here, redirecting some new savings to the brokerage account there, maybe revisiting how her employer plan is structured), so that by the time she’s actually making these decisions, those two buckets are big enough to be real options, not just lines on a statement.
That’s the difference between a recipe that technically works and one that gives you what you actually wanted.
Here’s the tradeoff
Because there’s always a tradeoff. Building out the other two buckets can mean giving up some of the deduction you’re used to getting today. That can feel like leaving money on the table in the short term, especially while you’re still in a high bracket.
But the cost of not doing it is a retirement where there’s plenty of money and fewer choices about how to strategize with it. Where the IRS, more than you, ends up deciding what bracket you live in for the next 20-plus years.
Plenty of money. Not a lot of control over how it’s served up.
Where does the money come from?
If you stopped working tomorrow and had to turn what you’ve built into a paycheck, where would that money come from first? Do you know what you’d owe? Do you know how that withdrawal would ripple into your Medicare premiums, your Social Security taxation, your bracket overall?
Most women I talk to can’t answer that off the top of their heads (and honestly, you don’t need to). However, it’s important that you have the answers documented in a strategy and understand the shape and outcome of the recipe you’ve put together.
The mix you have right now isn’t permanent. It’s a starting point, and however many years you have left before retirement is the window where this is still adjustable. Where the next contribution, the next Roth conversion, the next account you open can change the outcome.
This is the work I do with clients who are a few years out. Just helping them find the techniques the original recipe was missing, while there’s still time for it to matter.
You followed the recipe. You did the work. Now let’s get it to actually taste like what you’ve been picturing this whole time.
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