2026 Launch Codes: The Essential Numbers for Your Retirement Flight Plan

Introduction

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Whether you’re saving for retirement or deep in it, what are the most important numbers for 2026? You need to know, and what are the best New Year’s resolutions for someone about to retire? And what happens when a cosmic tornado meets a distant neighbor? Are you ready?

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome back to retirement. Is it Rocket Science? I’m your host, Dr. Chris Mullis, a practicing retirement planner with 20 years of experience helping clients live their best lives. And before that I was an astrophysicist and used the largest telescopes on earth and in space to map the structure and evolution of the universe

Our core mission is to show you how to lower your taxes, strengthen your portfolio, and spend more with confidence so you can make your retirement even better. Along the way, we’re going to make sure all the dimensions of your money universe are beautiful, effective, and resilient.

And of course, we’re gonna have some fun and learn some cool stuff by exploring the most unique places in the cosmos.

Want the resources and links from today’s show join our weekly retirement newsletter called The Launch. This is a great way for us to connect one-on-one. Just hit reply to our weekly email and your message comes right to me. Plus we share all the valuable resources. Links and smart launches steps you can take today to convert knowledge into action.

You can sign up for the launch by visiting Retirement isn’t rocket science.com.

 Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: In today’s show, we break down the biggest changes that come with 2026, examining key figures for retirement, contribution limits, social security adjustments, Medicare premiums, and much, much more. We explain why the best New Year’s resolution for someone on the cusp of retirement shouldn’t just be about doing more or doing less.

But about establishing a new foundation and staying with the New year theme, we explore a stunning, stellar metaphor for fresh starts. Now let’s dive in. I.

 Retirement Briefing Room

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome to the Retirement Briefing Room. This is where we huddle up to take a close look at important aspects of your financial life, spotlight pathways of success, and think about how to integrate these into your plans to make your retirement even better.

They say the only constant in the universe is change, and the IRS is certainly doing its part to prove that theory in 2026. But are these new numbers just turbulence or can we use them like a gravitational assist to boost your retirement portfolio? Today we are adjusting our trajectory.

Whether you’re five years out from your retirement launch or you’re already enjoying the view from orbit, today’s episode is a critical mission briefing. We’ve got all the key data for 2026 from the IRS and the Social Security Administration and more. And while a spreadsheet full of contribution limits might sound dry, I promise you this is the fuel for your retirement engine. Today we’re going through the important changes ahead for the year 2026.

We’re looking at how much you can save. A tricky new rule for high earners that might force a course correction and how to navigate the headwinds of Medicare premiums.

First, let’s talk about topping off the fuel tanks. We’re talking here about contribution limits. , There’s good news. You have more room to save in your tax advantaged buckets. For our diligent savers, I know that’s most of you.

The limits for 4 0 1 Ks and 4 0 3 Bs is increasing to 24,500 in 2026. If you are 50 years or older, the standard catchup contribution is bumping up to $8,000. That means a total of $32,500 going into your retirement plan in 2026 now, why does this matter if you’re already sitting on a substantial retirement nest egg? The answer is because every dollar you tuck away in a pre-tax 401k lowers your current taxable income. If you’re in your peak earning years right before retirement, which is the standard pattern, shaving $32,500 off your taxable income is a massive win for your tax bill today.

And for those specifically ages 60 to 63 in 2026. Remember the super catch up? We’ve talked about that before. That limit stays high at $11,250. If you’re in that narrow age launch window, you need to be maximizing this. It’s a limited time opportunity to supercharge your savings before you potentially separate from your employer

Now let’s pivot. You might be seeing a flashing warning side on your dashboard. For our high earners, this is crucial. There’s a new Roth flight plan you need to be aware of. It’s the high earner rule starting in 2026. A provision from the Secure Act 2.0 finally kicks in. If your wages, that’s W2 income exceeds $150,000 in 2025, you are no longer allowed to put your catchup contributions in a pre-tax bucket.

You must treat them as a Roth contribution. What does this mean for your flight plan? It means you lose the tax deduction on the catch up money immediately. You pay the tax now and the money grows tax free. Now, as a planner, I actually love tax diversification. Having tax assets is like having oxygen reserves.

It gives you flexibility later, but if you were banking on that deduction to keep you in a lower bracket this tax year, we need to rerun the numbers. We might need to look at other tax mitigation strategies like health savings accounts or strategic giving. Speaking of HSAs limits are creeping up there too. Families can now contribute $8,750 plus a catchup if you’re aged 55. Plus, I call the HSA the Stealth Bomber of retirement accounts because it’s triple tax free if used for medical expenses.

Maximize that before you retire. It’s your future medical fund.

Now let’s talk about the income side of the equation. In a sense, this is like atmospheric pressure on a rocket heading into space. The social security cost of living adjustment for 2026 is set at 2.8%.

Now 2.8% is better than 2.5%, and that’s what we saw in 2025. But let’s be real here. Does your personal inflation rate feel like 2.8%? If you’re spending money on travel, dining out, or healthcare, your costs might be rising faster than that. This is why we don’t rely solely on social security. It’s a stabilizer, but not the main engine.

We need your investment portfolio to outpace inflation, to maintain your purchasing power. Also for those still working, the wage base for Social Security taxes is jumping to $184,500. That means you’ll be paying Social Security payroll taxes on more of your income in 2026. It’s a slight drag on your take home pay, so don’t be surprised when your January paycheck looks slightly different.

Now let’s move to one of the most complex parts of our financial orbit. Medicare. The base premium for Part B coverage is going up to $202 and 90 cents a month. For our listeners, the bigger threat is the surcharge known as Irma, the income related monthly adjustment amount. Here’s the trap.

Medicare looks back at your tax return from two years ago, so your 2026 premiums are based on your 2024 income. The first surcharge bracket for 2026 starts at $109,000 for single filers and 218,000 for couples.

If you sell a rental property, cash out a big stock option, or do a massive Roth conversion. Without checking these brackets, you could accidentally push your income. Over that $218,000 line. Suddenly Your Medicare premiums spike not for just one month, but for the entire year. This is where having a co-pilot, a fee only planner is essential.

We can carefully plot your income distributions. Maybe we pull from a Roth account. Which doesn’t count as taxable income to keep you under that $218,000 threshold. We wanna keep your trajectory smooth and avoid those unnecessary surcharges.

Finally, let’s talk about something I know our listeners love and that’s giving back. You folks are nice people who care about your families and your cherish communities. The annual gift tax exclusion remains $19,000 per person. This is a great way to reduce the size of your taxable estate while helping your kids.

Or your grandkids now rather than later as a couple, you can gift $38,000 to a single individual tax free. If you wanna fund a grandchild’s wedding or help with a house down payment. Let’s coordinate that so it’s done efficiently and for those over age 70 and a half, the qualified charitable distribution. QCD, the QCD limit is increasing to $111,000. I cannot stress this enough. If you’re giving to charity and you have an IRA stop writing checks from your bank account, use the QCD.

It allows you to send money directly from your IRA to the charity. It counts towards your required minimum distribution if you have one. But here’s the magic. It does not count as taxable income for you. This is the ultimate win-win. The charity gets the full amount and you lower your adjusted gross income, which might just help you stay under those pesky Medicare Irma brackets that we just talked about.

So 2026 brings us higher limits, a new Roth rule for high earners and the usual creep of inflation and premiums. Retirement planning isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about building a ship that can handle whatever the future throws at it. These changes are small course corrections. If we adjust our flaps now, tweaking your 401k contributions, planning your income to avoid Irma and utilizing QC ds, you’ll stay on a smooth, stable financial trajectory.

You don’t have to calculate these vectors alone. That’s where we recommend you work with a retirement planning specialist in your mission control.

Now I bet you’re probably driving or exercising or doing something where it’s hard to have captured and written down all of these important numbers. That’s why we’ve created the 2026 important numbers cheat sheet. Use this guide. As you update your contributions, reevaluate your social security and Medicare decisions, or prepare to meet with your trusted advisor.

This free guide will be linked in our weekly newsletter, the launch. Now let’s head over to Mission Control to answer your financial questions and get you retirement ready.

 Ask Mission Control

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: In this week’s asked mission control. Our listener question comes from Jake. He asks, my wife and I are planning to retire in 2026. What are the best New Year’s resolutions for someone like us who are about to retire?

Wow, what a thoughtful and timely question. Jake, thank you so much for your submission. Retirement is not just about a cessation of work. It’s a complete reinvention of your daily life, social structure, and identity.

Therefore, the best New Year’s resolutions for someone on the cusp of retirement shouldn’t just be about doing more or doing less, but about establishing a new foundation. So let’s look at some of the best New Year’s resolutions for someone about to retire, and we will categorize them by pillars of transition. So What type or dimension are we navigating? Let’s begin with identity and purpose.

The biggest shock for many retirees is the loss of the work self. So we need to create a new elevator pitch. Resolve to define yourself without using your job title. When someone asks, what do you do? Have an answer ready that focuses on your interests, passions, and current projects.

For example, I’m an avid gardener and a mentor rather than I used to be an accountant.

Another piece here is to revive a dormant passion. Resolve to pickup. One. Hobby or interest you dropped 20 years ago because you quote, didn’t have time. And try to leverage the one hour rule. Commit to spending at least one hour a day, learning a completely new skill. That could be a language, an instrument, woodworking.

This helps keep the neuroplasticity of your brain high.

The second theme for a resolution that we want to consider is a financial theme, and this is one of my favorites from the. Money side. I call it the test drive. If you haven’t retired yet, use this year to simulate the reality live on your retirement budget. Now. If you’re still earning a salary, resolve to live strictly on the amount you plan to withdraw from your pension or, your portfolio.

Save the rest. This test, if your projected lifestyle is actually comfortable. Also consolidate and simplify. Resolve to clean up the financial junk drawer. Consolidate old 4 0 1 Ks. Organize digital passwords and update beneficiaries. Make your financial life easy to manage so you don’t spend your freedom worrying about your paperwork. A third flavor of resolution can be around health and make that mobility over muscle, right? Your health goals often fail because they’re aesthetic, like weight loss. In retirement. The goal is longevity and independence and health span. So let’s prioritize functional fitness. Resolve to focus on balance, flexibility, and core strength.

Can you get up from the floor without using your hands? Can you lift a suitcase? Overhead train for life, not the beach. And what about mastering the kitchen? If you’ve relied on takeout or cafeteria food while working, resolve to learn. Five. Healthy Go-to recipes. Cooking is a creative outlet that also protects your health and your wallet. A fourth theme to consider is social structure and replacing the water cooler work provides a built-in socialization mechanism when you leave that evaporates. So we need to work in diversifying your social portfolio. Resolve to make one new friend who has nothing to do with your former industry schedule Recurring events, spontaneity is great, but isolation is a risk.

Resolve to set up recurring commitments. A weekly walk with a friend, a monthly book club, a Tuesday volunteer shift. This will anchor your week.

Finally, let’s talk relationship dynamics. This one’s for couples retirement often means going from seeing your partner four hours a day to 24 hours a day, so I recommend you discuss the together or a part balance. Resolve to have an honest conversation about boundaries.

Is it healthy to resolve that you will not do everything together and consider a gap year adventure. Resolve to plan one significant trip or project that signifies the transition marking the clear line between your working life and your new freedom.

Let me close by saying, be careful not to over schedule yourself immediately. I see many retirees panic and fill every hour with volunteering and activities to avoid boredom, leading to burnout, a wise resolution. , I resolve to say no to major commitments for the first three to six months of retirement to allow myself time to decompress.

So how do you choose

if you are overwhelmed, pick one from each category to create a balanced approach. Number one, mental learn, one new skill. Number two, physical walk, 30 minutes daily. And number three, social. Have a weekly lunch with a friend and make it a standing appointment. Many thanks to Jake for this very timely and thought provoking question. If you’ve got a question that you’d like us to answer on the show, head over to retirement isn’t rocket science and click Ask a Question, or even better, you can skip to the front of the line by calling Mission Control at 7 0 4 2 3 4 6 5 5 0 and record your audio question.

Again, that’s 7 0 4 2 3 4 6 5 5 0. Now let’s broaden our perspective and head for a stellar nursery to check out an energetic newborn.

 Retirement Big Picture

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: Welcome to the Retirement Big Picture part of our show. This is where we look up and look out to expand our appreciation and understanding of our amazing universe. Space has a poetic way of illustrating the concept of new beginnings, and new beginnings are on our mind as we head into 2026. Whether it’s the birth of a star or the clearing of cosmic dust, these objects service stunning metaphors for starting fresh. Literally the stars of the show are Heric Harrow objects. These are small patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars. When a star is just beginning to form it ejects jets of partially ionized gas at incredibly high speeds when these jets collide with nearby clouds of. Gas and dust, they create glowing, colorful arcs.

These are their first cries of a newborn son

Thanks to a recent James Webb Space telescope image. Our specific Herba Harrow object is 49 50. Imagine a young toddler star, what we would call a proto star, buried in a thick cloud of dust. The star isn’t just sitting there, it’s throwing a bit of a cosmic tantrum. Launching narrow jets of materials into space at hundreds of kilometers per second.

When those jets slam into the surrounding gas, they create glowing, reddish orange arcs. NASA likes to describe it like the wake behind a speeding boat, but astronomers have a more dramatic name for this specific one. They like to call 49 50 the cosmic tornado. What’s truly wild about this image from Webb is the chance alignment, right at the tip of this.

Fiery tornado is a beautiful face on spiral galaxy. Now to the naked eye, it looks like the tornado is hitting the galaxy, but it’s a total optical illusion. The tornado is right here in our neighborhood. In our neighborhood being the Milky Way galaxy. While that galaxy. In the background is millions of light years behind it.

The Web Space telescope used its nerca and Mira instruments and peered through the dust to show us the chemistry of this chaos, specifically molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It’s a reminder that even when things look messy on the surface, there’s a complex, beautiful structure underneath.

 These Heric Harrow objects are named in honor of Dr. George Herwig and Dr. Guer Harrow, two astronomers who independently studied these stellar jets back in the 1950s.

Let’s talk a little bit about Dr. Herbi. He was born in 1920 and was a preeminent American astronomer, often hailed as the father of star formation studies because of his pioneering research into the birth and early evolution of stars. After a long and distinguished tenure at the Lick Observatory and uc, Santa Cruz, Dr.

Herbie quote, retired in 1987, only to begin a productive second act at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for astronomy. Moving to Honolulu allowed him to step away from administrative duties and focus exclusively on his research where he utilized the world class facilities on Mona to study diffuse interstellar bands and the high resolution spectroscopy.

That’s the spectrum of beautiful colors. Of young stellar objects during his time in Hawaii. He remained an active and formidable presence in the field, continuing to publish significant papers well into his nineties and mentoring a new generation of scientists until his death in 2013. I count myself very fortunate to be one of those next generation scientists. At my invitation, Dr. Herwig agreed to serve on my PhD committee at the University of Hawaii. He served with a small group of experts who oversaw, mentored, and ultimately judged my doctoral research and conferred that degree to me in 2001.

so I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to be mentored and guided by Dr. Herwig. His legacy is immortalized in the names of Herwig Harrow objects. Again, luminous patches of gas ejected from newborn stars and Herbi. A EBE Stars, a class of young, intermediate mass stars.

He was the first to categorize

So going back to the JWST image. Why does it matter? What’s the big deal from this latest observation? Well, web did something predecessors couldn’t do. It resolved the mystery of the fuzzy object at the tip of the jet. Again, that’s that distant galaxy in the background.

For years, we weren’t sure what that light was. Webb’s high resolution confirmed. It’s a beautiful barred spiral galaxy. We can see a blue central bulge. Full of older stars and reddish clumps in the spiral arms where newborn stars are being born. More importantly, we’re seeing these bowel shocks in such detail.

Astronomers can now map out exactly how much energy a young star pumps into its surroundings. It turns out these jets are the star’s way of clearing out space so it can finish growing. It’s the ultimate home clearing project. In a few thousand years, the tornado will move right across that distant galaxy, eventually hiding it.

From our view, it’s a fleeting moment of cosmic beauty captured perfectly by the most powerful telescope we’ve ever built.

 Conclusion

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: you’ll find that breathtaking image of Heric Harrow 49 50 and our 2026 important numbers cheat sheet in our weekly newsletter. Be sure to sign up for it at retirement. Isn’t rocket science.com.

 So what’s your next step for putting knowledge into action? If you’re still working, make sure you’re taking full advantage of your 401k or your 4 0 3 B or your 4 57. Are you maxing it out, including the catchup or the super up? If you have a high deductible health plan, are you on path? To max out your health savings account.

Remember, that’s triple tax savings. And are you using it like a stealth IRA, keeping it invested for the future instead of using it for current medical expenses and for our retirees. Are you working with your advisor to build out your 2026 tax forecasts? What are the best ways to source your income in 2026 to avoid Medicare surcharges or losing the enhanced senior deduction?

I challenge you to take just one idea from today’s show and put it into practice this week to make your retirement. Even better. Thanks so much for joining me. Remember, you’ve done the hard work of saving. Now let’s do the smart work of planning. Until next time, keep your eyes on the horizon. Enjoy the adventure.

Launching your best retirement starts today.

 Credits

Dr. Chris Mullis, PhD, CFP®: We thank the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for providing the radio communication between the space shuttle astronauts and the flight controllers.

Disclaimer

This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not specific tax, legal or investment advice.

Before considering acting on anything you hear in this show, first consult your own tax, legal or financial advisor.