26.5. That is the whole rule, and it has been sitting in the same table since 2022.
This is the required minimum distribution. It is the amount the law makes you take out of a tax-deferred account once you reach the age. Turn seventy-three, take last year’s closing balance, divide by 26.5. That much leaves before December is out.
About 3.8 percent. The IRS is not asking.
The figure shrinks about one point a year. At seventy-five it is 24.6. At eighty, 20.2. At ninety, 12.2.
It moves one direction only.
26.5
The divisor at seventy-three
12.2
The divisor at ninety
Same table, same account. At seventy-three that is 3.8 percent out the door. At ninety it is 8.2 percent. The withdrawal grows as a share of what is left, every year, on a schedule set before you retired.
Where this one lands in the cohort’s order, and why the date matters more than the mood.
The part that catches people is which balance the rule uses. It reaches back to last December, not to this morning.
So a strong year hands you a bigger forced withdrawal the following year. The market gives in one column and the December after takes a wider slice in another.
Everyone shares the deadline. Millions of accounts, one calendar, one month.
The money has to leave. It does not have to be spent.
Most of it lands in an ordinary taxable account and sits there looking for a home. That search is the reason a certain kind of salesman knows your birth year better than your children do.
And the door on the other side keeps widening. When SpaceX listed in June, retail buyers took a share in the low twenties. The usual slice is five to ten percent.
Wider access is a separate question from better odds. Private holdings are slow to sell when you want out. And the layer that places the money earns its fee for the placing.
Read that as a cost, the way you would read a closing statement on a house.
The arithmetic
The divisors 26.5 at 73, 24.6 at 75, 20.2 at 80 and 12.2 at 90 are the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, Publication 590-B, Appendix B, Table III, finalized in Treasury Decision 9930 and unchanged for every distribution year since 2022. The percentages of 3.8 and 8.2 are those divisors expressed as a share of balance. Under the SECURE 2.0 Act the start age is 73 for those born 1951 through 1959, and 75 for those born in 1960 or later. The distribution is calculated on the account balance as of December 31 of the prior year, and is due by December 31, with the first year allowed until April 1 of the following year. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on 12 June 2026 at $135 a share, raising about $75 billion; CNBC reported on 11 June that the retail allocation was set in the low twenties in percentage terms, against a typical five to ten. The read on why a December deadline concentrates the selling is Boomers Trade’s own.
Check which balance your administrator used this year. It should be last December’s, and ten minutes on the phone settles it. Then watch your own statement close out this December, because that figure is already writing next year’s withdrawal. It is the rare part of this you can see coming.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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