I Took My First RMD at 73 — and Accidentally Triggered an $1,847 Tax Bill

The Letter That Ruined My April Morning

I’m Ken. I’m 74 years old, I live outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, and until about six months ago I thought I had retirement figured out. I had $612,000 sitting in a traditional IRA I’d been building since my mid-thirties. I owned my house outright. My Social Security check — boosted by the 2.5% COLA that kicked in January 2026 — was covering my utilities and groceries. I was comfortable. And then my tax preparer, a no-nonsense woman named Rhonda, handed me a printout across her desk and said, “Ken, you owe a lot more than you expected this year.”

The number was $1,847 in additional federal tax — above and beyond what I’d already had withheld. It wasn’t a penalty. I hadn’t broken any rules. I had simply done what the IRS technically allows: I delayed my very first Required Minimum Distribution until April 1 of the year after I turned 73. What I hadn’t fully grasped was that by doing so, I was scheduling two taxable distributions inside the same calendar year. That stacked income pushed me out of the 12% bracket and into the 22% bracket on a slice of my income I had not planned for.

I’m writing this because I’ve since talked to three other guys at my Tuesday morning coffee group who have no idea this can happen. If you turned 73 in 2025 and haven’t taken your first RMD yet, this story is specifically for you.

How the First-Year RMD Rule Actually Works — and Where I Went Wrong

Here’s the rule, straight from IRS guidance: under the SECURE 2.0 Act, if you were born between 1951 and 1959, your Required Minimum Distribution age is 73. You must take your first RMD for the year in which you turn 73 — but the IRS gives you an extension. You can delay that first-year RMD all the way until April 1 of the following year. Every RMD after that first one must be taken by December 31 of its respective year, no exceptions.

I turned 73 in the spring of 2025. My IRA custodian sent me a notice, I read the part about the April 1 deadline, and I thought: great, I’ll wait. There was no rush. I didn’t need the money immediately, and I figured delaying meant delaying taxes. What I failed to fully process was the sentence right below that one: my second RMD — the one for the 2026 tax year — was still due by December 31, 2026.

So on March 14, 2026, I called my IRA custodian and requested my first RMD. Based on my December 31, 2024 IRA balance of $612,000 and the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table divisor for a 73-year-old (26.5), that distribution came to approximately $23,094. Then, because I also owed my 2026 RMD before year-end, I took that second distribution in November 2026 — calculated on my December 31, 2025 balance and a divisor of 25.5 for a 74-year-old, which worked out to roughly $22,800. Two distributions. Two chunks of ordinary income. Both landing on the same Form 1040.

Ken’s situation isn’t unusual. It’s a timing trap that’s completely legal and completely avoidable — but only if you see it coming.

The Dollar-by-Dollar Damage: What Two RMDs Did to My Tax Return

Let me show you what the income stack actually looked like on my 2026 return, because the numbers are the whole story.

My Social Security benefit, after the 2.5% COLA adjustment, was running about $2,190 a month — roughly $26,280 for the year. Under the provisional income formula (IRC §86), 85% of that, or about $22,338, was taxable. I also had a small pension from my former employer: $14,400 a year. Add in the two RMDs — $23,094 plus $22,800 — and my gross income before deductions was approximately $82,632.

I file as a single taxpayer. The 2026 standard deduction for a single filer is $15,750, and because I’m over 65, I got an additional $2,000 on top of that, bringing my total deduction to $17,750. That left me with taxable income of roughly $64,882.

Here’s where the bracket math bites. For 2026, the 12% bracket for a single filer runs from $11,925 up to approximately $48,475. The 22% bracket picks up from there. With just my Social Security, pension, and one RMD, my taxable income would have landed around $42,032 — comfortably inside the 12% zone. But that second RMD pushed roughly $22,400 of income into the 22% bracket. The marginal difference between 12% and 22% on that slice is 10 cents per dollar. On $22,400, that’s $2,240 in extra tax — and after accounting for some of my withholding on the distributions, the net surprise on Rhonda’s printout was $1,847.

Ken stared at that number for a long moment. Then he wrote the check, because what else do you do.

One more wrinkle worth naming: because my income crossed $106,000 — wait, actually it didn’t, I came in under that threshold. But Rhonda pointed out that if I’d had even a modest investment gain on top of everything else, I could have triggered an IRMAA surcharge on my Medicare Part B premium, which currently runs $206.50 a month at the standard rate. IRMAA kicks in for single filers above $106,000 in modified adjusted gross income, and it can add hundreds of dollars a month to your Medicare costs. I squeaked under. Others in my exact situation might not.

What I Did — and What I’d Do Differently Starting Now

After the tax bill was paid, I sat down with Rhonda again, this time not to fix a problem but to prevent the next one. Here’s what we mapped out, and here’s what I wish I’d done in late 2025.

The single biggest lever I had — and didn’t pull — was taking my first RMD in December 2025 instead of waiting until March 2026. Yes, I would have owed tax on it for tax year 2025. But it would have been the only RMD on my 2025 return, keeping my income lower and my bracket more manageable. The April 1 extension is a gift for people who genuinely need the extra months to arrange their finances, not a strategy for deferring taxes. I misread its purpose.

On November 3, 2026, I called my custodian and took my 2026 RMD — the second one — with a flat 22% voluntary federal withholding election, so there would be no surprise balance due in April 2027. That’s something you can request directly on IRS Form W-4R, which replaced the old W-4P withholding form for retirement distributions. Doing it that way means the withholding counts as paid evenly throughout the year under the IRS’s “deemed paid” rule, which can help you avoid an underpayment penalty under IRC §6654.

Rhonda also mentioned something I’m now exploring for future years: a Qualified Charitable Distribution, or QCD. Under IRC §408(d)(8), once you’re 70½ or older you can direct up to $105,000 a year from your IRA straight to a qualified charity. That amount counts toward your RMD but never touches your adjusted gross income — meaning it can’t push you into a higher bracket, can’t inflate your Medicare IRMAA calculation, and can’t make more of your Social Security taxable. I’m not charitably inclined enough to zero out my entire RMD this way, but even routing $8,000 or $10,000 to my church could meaningfully trim my taxable income next year.

Ken is also keeping a close eye on the IRMAA threshold. If my IRA balance keeps growing — or if I have a year with capital gains — I could cross $106,000 in MAGI without much warning, and that Medicare surcharge would follow me two years later under the lookback rule. Knowing the threshold exists is half the battle.

One last note on the numbers that don’t apply to me but might apply to you: if you’re still working and contributing to a retirement account, the 2026 IRA contribution limit is $7,500, with an additional $1,100 catch-up for those 50 and older (total $8,600). And the 2026 401(k) deferral limit is $24,500, with a $8,000 catch-up at 50+. Those contributions don’t reduce an RMD — once you’re subject to RMDs, you must still take them regardless of new contributions — but they’re worth knowing if you have a working spouse or part-time income of your own. Roth IRAs, notably, are not subject to RMDs during the owner’s lifetime, which is one reason some people consider Roth conversions in the years before they turn 73.

The IRS rule that caught me is documented in IRS Publication 590-B and in the FAQs on irs.gov under “Retirement Plan and IRA Required Minimum Distributions.” The relevant SECURE 2.0 provision is found in §107 of the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, which amended IRC §401(a)(9) to raise the RMD age from 72 to 73 for individuals born in 1951 through 1959. The April 1 first-year extension has existed for decades — it’s the double-distribution consequence that trips people up, because the law is silent on what happens to your tax bracket when you use it.

I’m not angry. I followed the rules. But $1,847 is a real number, and it’s a number I could have kept in my pocket with one phone call in December 2025. If you’re in the same spot Ken was — turned 73 last year, haven’t taken that first RMD yet — the clock is already running. The April 1 deadline is the finish line for avoiding a penalty, not the starting line for smart planning.