If you want to pay the lowest taxes allowed by law in retirement you will need to start planning before you retire. If you are a late starter to planning, all is not lost. There are several financial and tax stages to retirement. Understanding how each relates and interacts with the other stages is key to lower taxes in retirement. The focus of this article is the distribution phase of retirement. However, retirement planning starts from a young age. (Warning! No plan is still a plan, just a bad one.) Therefore, you want to invest in retirement accounts as soon as you are able since time is the most important factor in growing your retirement savings. First we need to set some ground rules. Not every investment gain is created equal. Understanding how each will eventually be taxed is an important part of your decision process. Let’s discuss how investment withdrawals are taxed. ( The difference between tax-advantaged versus regular accounts : I will use traditional and Roth to identify many retirement plans.…