The whole purpose of retirement income planning is to optimize your retirement funds as much as possible. However, besides owning an adequate amount of retirement assets, there are two other ways in which you can achieve this goal: you can either maximize your income or minimize your income tax liability.

In fact, there are around six stealth taxes that might increase your income tax liability but also reduce your lifetime after-tax retirement income. Except for only one, all of them have been in use for several years now. Even if some of them are a bit hard to avoid because of their low-income threshold, you should still plan ahead and continue throughout your retirement. Here are the 7 ground rules you need to know about the stealth tax: