This article appears as part of Casey Weade's Weekend Reading for Retirees series. Every Friday, Casey highlights four hand-picked articles on trending retirement topics and delivers them straight to your email inbox. Get on the list here.

Saving and spending: Accumulation and Distribution are two financial phases you will experience in your adult life, and both are critical to a successful retirement. Throughout the accumulation phase, you focus on saving. Then, when you step away from your career, you enter the distribution phase. This is where we find many retirees struggle with the fear of spending money they worked so hard to save, and wondering if it will last their lifetime.

While we don’t have a crystal ball to know how long you’ll need income, life expectancies are continuing to rise, and this article advises to financially prepare to live until at least age 90. Living longer means potentially facing a longer list of issues to account for in your retirement plan, and they might need revisited several times throughout your life. Here are several areas that can affect successful distribution outcomes:

📌Retirement income planning: This is your “replace your paycheck” plan, and includes coordinating income sources such as Social Security benefits, Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs), withdrawals from taxable accounts and possibly pensions or real estate income

📌Portfolio planning: This is your roadmap for setting and achieving goals-based results, leaving your personal return, net of taxes and fees to determine your future financial success

📌Tax planning: Taxes can quickly diminish your retirement income, and based on expert predictions, they will become an even bigger factor in future financial outcomes

📌Risk management planning: This includes all forms of insurance coverage, such as health care, long-term care and Medicare. You need to know if you’re over-insured in some areas or under-insured in others so that their corresponding expenses don’t deplete your nest egg.

📌Legacy planning: This is how you ensure loved ones and charities receive the assets you want to pass on to them. It also means looking at tax impacts of inherited assets and how they will affect your beneficiaries

Beyond simple strategies: Not to downplay what you’ve been doing over the years, but the reality is, getting to retirement isn’t all that complicated. You make money, save money and grow money. Unfortunately, reaching retirement will require more complex planning that you might have yet to encounter.