Your choice will have a big impact on your taxes.

When it’s time to tap your retirement savings, conventional wisdom dictates that you should first withdraw money from your taxable accounts. That allows your IRAs and other tax-deferred accounts to compound for as long as possible. You never want to pay a tax bill today that you can postpone until tomorrow, says Rande Spiegelman, vice-president of financial planning for Charles Schwab.

But even Spiegelman concedes that every rule has its exceptions. And sometimes it pays to split your retirement withdrawals between your taxable and tax-deferred accounts now to prevent a huge tax bill later.

Retirement is also a good time to review how your investments are allocated among your taxable and tax-deferred accounts. You may be surprised to find that the investment strategies that worked well while you were saving for retirement could work against you when you start withdrawing your money.

Investment swaps. There’s a big difference between the way investments are taxed inside a retirement account and outside of one. When you hold an asset for more than a year, then sell it at a profit, you pay long-term capital-gains taxes at a maximum rate of 15% — if the asset is held in a taxable account.

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If that same asset is held in a tax-deferred retirement account, there is no tax consequence when you sell it. But when you withdraw the money from the account, all of it is taxed — not just your profit — at your ordinary income-tax rate, which could be as high as 35%. The 20-point spread between the maximum long-term-gains rate and the top ordinary income-tax rate can make a significant difference in your after-tax income during retirement.

But most people have their investments in the wrong accounts when they retire, says Mark Cortazzo, head of the Macro Consultants financial-planning firm, in Parsippany, N.J. People tend to hold most of their long-term-growth investments inside their 401(k)s and keep their Ôsafe money’ in CDs and money-market accounts in taxable accounts, says Cortazzo. That’s fine while you’re accumulating assets, but once you retire you’re better off flip-flopping them.

Let’s say you have $100,000 invested in stock-index mutual funds inside your 401(k) and another $100,000 worth of certificates of deposit in your taxable account. When you retire and roll your 401(k) into an IRA, you could sell your mutual funds — with no tax consequence — and use the money to buy CDs or bonds. You would defer tax payments until you withdraw money from the IRA. At that time, the entire distribution, including the CD and bond interest, would be taxed at your ordinary tax rate — the same rate you’d pay on the interest from the CDs if they were held inside a taxable account.

But you’d save considerably in your taxable account by cashing in the CDs and buying the same index funds you once held in your 401(k). You’d create a whole new cost basis for the stock funds in your taxable account, and as long as you held the assets for at least a year before selling them, you’d be taxed at the maximum 15% capital-gains rate — and only on your profits. In addition, you could use any investment losses in your taxable account to offset profits and reduce your overall tax bill — something you can’t do with investments in an IRA.

So just by swapping the location of your investments, you maintain your portfolio’s asset mix and increase your after-tax returns without taking on any additional risk, Cortazzo says. Your money will also last longer because you won’t have to withdraw as much from your taxable accounts each year to generate the same amount of after-tax income. (To get an idea of how to divide your assets among taxable and tax-deferred accounts, take the quick quiz at www.trivant.com/ira-tax-benefits .)