EP Wealth Vice President, Advisor, Zach Pidgeon, CFP®, EA, shares how pro and college coaches can manage retirement accounts accumulated across multiple teams, from consolidation strategies to tax-efficient withdrawals in retirement.
College and professional coaches change jobs frequently, and each new school or organization means a new retirement plan. Over a 20- or 30-year career, a coach can easily end up with 10-15 or more old accounts spread across former employers, different custodians, and different plan types. Without a strategy for managing those accounts along the way, coaches may reach retirement without a clear sense of what they've saved, where it's held, or how to draw income from those accounts efficiently.
That's the kind of planning I focus on with coaching clients at EP Wealth. Having spent six years at Duke University, including a role as Director of Football Operations, I understand how the coaching profession works from the inside, which helps me guide coaches through the retirement planning challenges that come with a career of frequent moves.
When I first sit down with coaches and their families, the process often starts with what I call "getting to the starting line": tracking down old accounts and getting everything into a position where we can start making informed decisions. This blog walks through the key pieces of that process:
The retirement plans available to you depend on where you're coaching:
Here is a quick breakdown of the different account types, with some special considerations for coaches:
A retirement savings plan offered by for-profit employers, including professional sports organizations. Contributions are made through payroll, either pre-tax (reducing your current taxable income) or as Roth contributions (after-tax, with tax-free withdrawals in retirement). Growth is tax-deferred. When you leave an employer, a 401(k) can be rolled over into a new employer's plan or into an IRA, which makes it portable as you move through your career.
The nonprofit and public university equivalent of a 401(k). Contribution limits, tax treatment, portability, and withdrawal rules are largely the same.
A deferred compensation plan available to employees of state and local governments and certain nonprofits, including universities. It operates almost identically to a 403(b), with one critical difference: it carries its own separate contribution limit. A college coach who maxes out a 403(b) can also max out a 457, effectively doubling their annual retirement savings.
I urge most of our college coaching clients to use the 457 in addition to the 403(b) when it's available. For coaches later in their careers who may be trying to make up for lower-earning early years, the 457 can be especially impactful.
Often, coaches don't take advantage of the 457 simply because they didn't know it was available. When you're onboarding at a new school, you're in a new city with a lot going on. Reviewing every detail of the benefits package may not feel like a top priority in that moment, but it's worth the time.
A defined-benefit plan that provides a guaranteed monthly income in retirement, calculated based on years of service and salary history. Unlike the plans above, the benefit doesn't depend on how much you contribute or how investments perform.
The trade-off is that pensions require working in the same district or state for most of your career. Coaches who leave before meeting the vesting threshold may forfeit the benefit entirely, and even those who do vest may receive a relatively small payout if they didn't accumulate enough years of service.
At the college level, pensions may be offered by the university, but coaches are often classified as exempt employees, which can make them ineligible. In other cases, coaches may be given a choice between enrolling in the pension or the 403(b). I typically recommend the 403(b) in those situations, because most coaches are unlikely to stay in the same state for 20 years. The 403(b) can follow you as you move from job to job; a pension tied to one state's retirement system generally cannot.
When an employer makes contributions to your retirement plan — such as matching contributions to a 403(b) or 401(a) — those contributions may be subject to a vesting schedule. If you leave before the schedule is fully met, you may forfeit some or all of the employer's contributions. Coaches are particularly vulnerable to this, because frequent job changes mean they often leave a university before they're fully vested. Over the course of a career with multiple stops, the cumulative impact can be significant. Reviewing the vesting schedule when you're hired at a new school can help you understand what you stand to keep — or lose — if and when you move on.
Four Options for an Old Retirement Plan
Every time a coach changes jobs, there's a decision to make about the retirement plan at the previous employer. There are four options, though in my view, only two of them are worth serious consideration.
This is typically the least favorable choice. You lose retirement savings, pre-tax dollars become fully taxable, and if you're under age 59½, there's an early withdrawal penalty on top of that. Once that penalty is incurred, there's no way to undo it.
This might seem harmless, but it's how accounts get lost. If you've coached at six or seven schools over the years and left a plan behind at each one, tracking those accounts down later takes real time and effort—and sometimes forensic-level detective work. For coaches who have been in the profession for 20-plus years, our initial process is often a search for outstanding retirement accounts that have been left behind along the way.
This is often a strong move, particularly during high-earning years. It keeps your retirement savings consolidated and easier to manage. It can also preserve your ability to use what's known as a backdoor Roth strategy — a way for high earners who exceed Roth IRA income limits to still get money into a Roth by contributing to a traditional IRA and converting it. If you have pre-tax dollars sitting in a traditional IRA from a prior rollover, that conversion can become partially taxable, which may reduce or eliminate the benefit. Keeping old plan balances in an employer plan rather than an IRA avoids that issue.
Employer-sponsored plans also tend to offer stronger creditor protection than IRAs, though that's rarely a deciding factor.
One detail that can simplify things: some coaches who have worked at multiple TIAA-affiliated schools may find that their accounts are already on the same platform, which makes the picture easier to manage even without formally consolidating.
This can be a good option for organization and for gaining access to professional investment management outside of an employer plan. The trade-offs: a traditional IRA balance may affect backdoor Roth eligibility as described above, and there may be an advisory fee associated with professional management.
While consolidating your accounts — whether into a current employer plan or an IRA — can offer real advantages, it shouldn't necessarily be a decision you make automatically. Some old employer plans, for example, may have strong investment options or low costs that make them worth keeping in place. The right approach can depend on the individual situation, and this is where working with a financial planning team can make a real difference — evaluating the investment options, costs, and tax treatment of each account before making a final decision.
In retirement, I view consolidation as close to a given. Having everything in one IRA—or one pre-tax and one Roth account—makes withdrawal management, tax planning, and distribution tracking far simpler than maintaining several separate accounts and drawing from each one individually.
Retirement Account Decisions at Each Career Stage
For coaches who see a long list of old accounts and wonder where their contributions should be going, the answer is more straightforward than it might seem: you contribute only to the retirement plans available through your current employer. Prior employer accounts can't receive new contributions.
The general prioritization I follow with coaching clients:
For coaches who are later in their careers and earning at their peak, using the 457 alongside the 403(b) can meaningfully accelerate retirement savings—particularly for those who spent early career years in lower-paying positions and are looking to build additional savings now.
In retirement, the question of which accounts to withdraw from — and how much to take from each — has direct tax implications. The right approach depends on account balances, account types, tax brackets, spending goals, and whether there's a pension or other fixed income in the picture. There's no one-size-fits-all answer, but several strategies come up consistently in the planning we do with coaching clients.
Different accounts carry different tax treatment. Withdrawals from pre-tax accounts like traditional IRAs and 403(b)s count as taxable income. Roth withdrawals do not. Given these differences, the order and amount you withdraw from each account in a given year can affect how much you owe in taxes. A coach drawing from both a pre-tax IRA and a Roth account, for example, could take more from the Roth and less from the IRA in a given year to keep taxable income lower.
This kind of year-by-year calibration is where working with an advisory team that integrates tax planning with financial planning becomes particularly important.
A Roth conversion involves moving money from a pre-tax retirement account into a Roth account. You pay taxes on the converted amount in the year of the conversion, but from that point forward, the money grows tax-free and withdrawals in retirement are tax-free as well.
For coaches, the opportunity to convert at a favorable tax rate may arise naturally. A coach who transitions from a high-earning role to a part-time or support staff position before full retirement will see a drop in income — and with it, a drop in tax bracket. That window of lower income could allow for conversions at a lower rate, positioning more of their savings for tax-free withdrawals later.
The Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount is a Medicare surcharge that can be triggered when income exceeds certain thresholds. Distributions from large retirement accounts can push income past those thresholds, resulting in higher premiums. This is something to start planning for about two years before Medicare enrollment, since IRMAA is based on income from two years prior.
Required minimum distribution rules differ depending on the type of account, which adds complexity for coaches who hold multiple account types:
For coaches who haven't consolidated their accounts before reaching RMD age, this can add a real layer of administrative complexity to annual withdrawals — and it's another reason to consider consolidation earlier rather than later.
The retirement account decisions coaches face over a career are interconnected. How you handle one choice can open up or limit your options on the next. That's why these decisions work best when financial planning, tax planning, and retirement income strategy are coordinated together rather than handled piece by piece.
At EP Wealth, that coordination is built into our process. When a coach has a planning team in place early, each job change becomes a managed event — someone is tracking existing accounts, evaluating the new school's plan options, and keeping the full financial picture organized as your career progresses. The longer a coach goes without coordinated planning, the harder the picture is to piece together — and the less time there is to adjust contributions, tax strategy, and account types before retirement arrives.
In a profession where job changes are frequent, the goal of our planning is to get coaches and their families to a position where they can choose the next job, not feel pressured to take it. That same principle carries into retirement: coaches who have had coordinated planning throughout their careers have more flexibility and more options when the time comes to step away.
Pro and college coaches navigating retirement planning across multiple teams and account types can connect with EP Wealth's wealth management team for athletes and coaches to discuss their situation and explore how coordinated planning may help.
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