SUCCESS

Pixar’s animated comedy “Hoppers” is coming to digital streaming this week as the company continues to recover from the release of the movie bust “Elio.”

The “set it and forget it” strategy is at risk in volatile markets. Savvy managers can dodge sectors your index fund is forced to own.

DeFi leaders say that AI will arm both attackers and defenders, and widen the gap between projects that prioritize security and those that do not.

Most people spend years building up three types of accounts to fund their retirement: a taxable brokerage account, a traditional IRA or 401(k), and a Roth IRA. What they don’t always consider is that the order in which they spend those accounts down can be just as important as how much they have saved.

Get the sequence wrong, and you could pay tens of thousands more in taxes over retirement than you needed to.

Tip: Use our Retirement Withdrawal Sequence Calculator to see how different strategies affect your taxes and how long your money lasts.

The Basic Sequence Most Advisors Recommend

The conventional approach goes like this:

Taxable brokerage accounts first

Traditional IRA and 401(k) accounts second

Roth IRA and Roth 401(k) accounts last

The logic behind each step is straightforward.

When you sell from a taxable brokerage account, you only owe tax on the gain, not the full amount you withdraw. And if you’ve held those investments for more than a year, that gain is taxed at the long-term capital gains rate — 0%, 15%, or 20% for most people — rather than ordinary income rates that can run much higher. Spending this money first also eliminates future taxable growth in the account, which reduces your ongoing tax drag.

Traditional IRA and 401(k) withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income, dollar-for-dollar. The money has been compounding tax-deferred, which is valuable — but the IRS is owed its share on every dollar that comes out. You want to let those accounts keep growing as long as possible, but not so long that required minimum distributions (RMDs) force large withdrawals later.

Roth accounts are last because they’re the most valuable money you have in retirement. Withdrawals are tax-free. Growth is tax-free. And Roth IRAs have no required minimum distributions during your lifetime. Every year you leave a Roth account untouched, it compounds without any future tax consequence. Spending it early permanently gives up that advantage.

The RMD Problem

Here’s where the sequencing becomes really important. Once you turn 73, the IRS requires you to take minimum distributions from your traditional accounts, whether you need the money or not. Those distributions are taxed as ordinary income.

If you’ve left a large traditional IRA untouched for years while drawing down other accounts, RMDs can push you into a higher tax bracket, increase the portion of your Social Security benefits that’s taxable, and trigger higher Medicare premiums through IRMAA surcharges.

The conventional sequence helps prevent this by drawing down the traditional account gradually through retirement rather than letting it balloon unchecked.

When the Conventional Sequence Isn’t Optimal

Many financial planners now suggest a more flexible approach: in the early years of retirement, before Social Security kicks in and before RMDs begin, consider intentionally pulling some money from your traditional accounts, even if you don’t need to, and converting some of it to a Roth. This is called a Roth conversion strategy.

The idea is to “fill up” a lower tax bracket in years when your income is relatively low. Paying 22% in tax now to move money into a Roth can be a better deal than paying that same rate (or higher) later when RMDs stack on top of Social Security income.

The right answer depends on your specific balances, tax situation, state of residence, and Social Security timing. There’s no universal sequence that works for everyone.

This Matters Before You Retire, Too

The withdrawal sequence only gives you flexibility if you actually have money spread across all three account types. If everything you’ve saved is in a traditional 401(k), every dollar you pull in retirement gets taxed as ordinary income — you don’t have options.

If you’re still working, it’s worth looking at your current mix. Are you building toward having something in each bucket — taxable, traditional, and Roth? That might mean directing some contributions to a Roth 401(k) or Roth IRA instead of pre-tax accounts, especially if you expect to be in a similar tax bracket in retirement. It might also mean doing small Roth conversions in lower-income years before you stop working.

You don’t need a perfect three-way split. You just need enough in each bucket to have choices later.

Run the Numbers for Your Situation

The difference between strategies isn’t theoretical. Depending on your account balances and tax rates, the gap in total lifetime taxes between the best and worst withdrawal sequence can reach six figures.

Use our Retirement Withdrawal Sequence Calculator to compare all four strategies side by side and see a year-by-year projection of your balances and taxes.
The post The Order You Withdraw Retirement Money Matters More Than You Think appeared first on Clark Howard.

The US seized an Iranian ship for breaching its blockade. What comes next could revive prize law—with implications for doing business in wartime and conflict with China.

Trump is expected to speak at his crypto conference in Palm Beach shortly.

The top three picks in the draft — Fernando Mendoza, David Bailey and Jeremiyah Love — will each be eligible to sign deals worth $50 million

Daredevil: Born Again cannot stop spoiling season 3 by offering essentially no safe quarter for the characters it’s adding.

The first time I saw the number, I went back and checked it again.On Friday, Nvidia’s stock closed up 4.3% at $208.27, lifting the company’s market value past $5 trillion for the first time ever, according to CNBC. That means a chip company that spent most of its life making graphics cards is now worth more, on paper, than the annual economic output of almost every country on earth.Only the United States and China produce more in a year than Nvidia is now valued at, based on 2026 nominal GDP projections in the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. Germany, Japan, India, and the UK all sit below that $5 trillion line when you look at the IMF‑linked rankings captured by economic data sites like Worldometer.Put simply: if Nvidia were a country, it would be the world’s third‑largest economy, at least in this loose, emotional sense of scale.

Only two countries are now worth more than NVIDIA.Photo by Robert Way on Getty Images

How Nvidia climbed into the economic big leaguesThis didn’t come out of nowhere.Over the past few years, Nvidia has gone from a $1 trillion giant to a $5 trillion behemoth, powered by one thing: the world’s hunger for artificial intelligence. Nvidia’s market cap first touched the $5 trillion mark in intraday trading in late 2025, then finally closed above that level on April 24, 2026, as investors piled back into chipmakers ahead of tech earnings, CNBC reported. Related: Goldman Sachs just found a reason to like Nvidia stock againThe basic story is straightforward when you strip away the jargon. Modern AI models are unbelievably hungry for computing power. Nvidia’s graphics processing units have become the default chips that train and run those models, whether they belong to OpenAI, Anthropic, or the big cloud platforms you know by name. That link between AI and Nvidia’s hardware has been at the center of almost every Nvidia earnings story on CNBC over the past two years.We have also watched the ripple effects. Deutsche Bank estimated that Nvidia’s valuation already accounted for 3.6% of global GDP when the company was “only” worth around $4 trillion, according to an analysis highlighted by Investing.com in 2025. That same report pointed out that at $4 trillion, Nvidia was larger than the entire stock markets of Britain, France, and Germany combined, a comparison that would have sounded absurd five years ago.Underneath the commentary, the numbers kept marching higher. Nvidia’s revenue, which Investing.com pegged at just under $61 billion for 2024, more than doubled from the prior year and continued to surge as data‑center orders exploded. Nvidia sales totaled $215.9 billion in fiscal 2026, up 65% year over year.A 2025 academic paper on Nvidia’s long‑term investing case noted that net profit had increased 681% over a two‑year period and argued that Nvidia held close to 90% of the discrete GPU market and 98% of the data center GPU space at the height of the AI boom.When you connect those dots, the $5 trillion valuation starts to make more emotional sense. This is the company sitting at the tollbooth of the AI economy. Every time a major cloud provider decides to build another AI data center, Nvidia gets a bigger cut.The strange feeling of owning a piece of a “country”Here’s where the story stops being theoretical and starts to get personal.If you invest through a broad index fund, there’s a very good chance Nvidia is already one of your biggest holdings. The company has become one of the heaviest weights in major benchmarks, and its rise has helped pull entire indexes higher even as plenty of other stocks lag. The International Monetary Fund warned in early 2026 that U.S. growth “rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation,” with AI‑driven tech and stock market valuations doing much of the heavy lifting, in a report highlighted by TheStreet. That warning overlaps with your lived reality as an investor. If one company’s stock becomes a pillar of both market returns and economic optimism, any stumble can feel a lot bigger than one ticker going red.More Nvidia:Nvidia is losing an industry that saved it from bankruptcyNvidia CEO makes surprising admission on OpenAI and AnthropicGoldman Sachs just found a reason to like Nvidia stock againAt the same time, Goldman Sachs economists said they expect U.S. growth in 2026 to remain relatively strong, helped by tax cuts, easier financial conditions, and business investment in areas including artificial intelligence, according to the bank’s 2026 U.S. Economic Outlook.New York Fed President John Williams has also highlighted robust investment in artificial intelligence as one factor supporting his forecast that real U.S. GDP growth will run around two and a half percent in 2026, according to prepared remarks published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.What that means for you is simple and uncomfortable at the same time:You have already been benefiting from Nvidia’s rise if you own U.S. stock funds.You are now more exposed to Nvidia than you might realize, because its sheer size tugs on your portfolio and your economy.I find that mix of upside and fragility is what makes the “bigger than almost every country” line stick. It isn’t just a fun comparison. It’s a reminder that your financial future is tied into the same story the rest of Wall Street is betting on.Making sense of a $5 trillion betThere’s a temptation to call any number this big a bubble. There’s also a temptation to assume markets know exactly what they’re doing. Reality, as usual, sits somewhere in between.On the optimistic side, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly signaled that he sees at least $1 trillion of cumulative revenue tied to its Blackwell and Rubin platforms through 2027, a figure he discussed in a 2026 keynote that CNBC later unpacked on air. If AI continues to seep into everything from search to software to manufacturing, that doesn’t sound wildly out of line with how much companies are spending to rewire their systems.On the cautious side, CNBC recently ran a segment pointing out that Nvidia’s earnings forecasts now have to clear incredibly high bars at a time when some investors are questioning whether AI spending is front‑loaded or sustainable, and analysts tracked by LSEG expect blockbuster revenue growth to slow over the next few years. There’s also the broader macro picture. The IMF’s April 2026 update raised its global growth forecast to roughly 3.3%, with much of that strength coming from advanced economies where technology and artificial intelligence investment remain concentrated, according to the fund’s World Economic Outlook.The world economy is projected to reach about 123.6 trillion dollars in nominal output in 2026, a scale where Nvidia’s multitrillion-dollar market value represents a noticeable slice of total market capitalization, based on a breakdown of IMF projections compiled by Voronoi.When one company’s market cap shows up in the same conversation as global GDP, you don’t need anyone else to tell you it’s a meaningful moment. You can feel it in the way every AI headline, every chip shortage, every regulatory rumor suddenly seems to matter a bit more to your own plans.What you can take away from thisYou and I can’t personally control whether Nvidia ends up being remembered as the engine of a long AI boom or the poster child for an overextended rally. We also don’t have to.What we can do is let this $5 trillion headline sharpen a few practical instincts:When one stock gets this big, diversification stops being optional and becomes a necessity.When AI spending props up both markets and GDP, it’s worth thinking about how your skills, your job, and your investments intersect with that trend, instead of treating it as an abstract tech story.When a company’s value crosses into “bigger than almost every economy” territory, it’s a reminder to check your risk, not just your returns.Nvidia’s new milestone means that when you open your brokerage app or read your 401(k) statement, you’re not just looking at numbers on a screen. You’re, in a very real way, looking at a piece of what the world currently believes about the future of intelligence, productivity, and economic growth.You might not have asked for that when you bought your first index fund. But now that you know it, you can decide how much of that belief you want your money riding on.And that, more than the headline itself, is the part of this story that actually belongs to you.Related: Bank of America revamps Nvidia-backed CoreWeave and Nebius stocks

The White House said it would send envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan for negotiations, but Iranian officials said no direct talks are expected.