Get What's Yours
The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security
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3.2 • 57 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Social Security law has changed! Get What’s Yours has been revised and updated to reflect new regulations that took effect on April 29, 2016.
Get What’s Yours has proven itself to be the definitive book about how to navigate the forbidding maze of Social Security and emerge with the highest possible benefits. It is an engaging manual of tactics and strategies written by well-known financial commentators that is unobtainable elsewhere. You could try reading all 2,728 rules of the Social Security system (and the thousands of explanations of these rules), but academia’s Kotlikoff, the popular press’s Moeller, and public television’s Solman explain the Social Security system just as comprehensively, and a lot more comprehensibly. Moreover, they demonstrate that what you don’t know can seriously hurt you: wrong decisions about which Social Security benefits to apply for cost individual retirees tens of thousands of dollars in lost income every year. (Some of those people are even in the book.)
Changes to Social Security that take effect in 2016 make it more important than ever to wait as long as possible (until age 70, if possible) to claim Social Security benefits. The new law also has significant implications for those who wish to claim divorced spousal benefits (and how many Social Security recipients even know about divorced spousal benefits?). Besides addressing these and other issues, this revised edition contains a chapter explaining how Medicare rules can shape Social Security decisions.
Many other personal-finance books briefly address Social Security, but none offers the full, authoritative, yet conversational analysis of Get What’s Yours.
Get What’s Yours explains Social Security benefits through basic strategies and stirring stories. It covers the most frequent benefit scenarios faced by married retired couples; by divorced retirees; by widows and widowers. It explains what to do if you’re a retired parent of dependent children; disabled; an eligible beneficiary who continues to work. It addresses the tax consequences of your choices, as well as the financial implications for other investments. It does all this and more.
There are more than 52 million Americans aged 54 to 69. Ten thousand of them reach Social Security’s full retirement age of 66 every day. For all these people—and for their families and friends—Get What’s Yours has proven to be an invaluable, and therefore indispensable, tool.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Social Security is widely mistrusted and little understood by most Americans, and with good reason: the program's operating manual contains 2,728 core rules, and thousands of additional instructions. This can't-miss guide to the system comes from Kotlikoff, a Boston University economist; Moller, an expert on aging; and Solman, a PBS NewsHour economics correspondent. After a conversation among all three about their own retirement planning revealed how confusing the system is, they set out to write a book pointing out traps and ways to maximize the reader's retirement benefits. With a little tough love (reminding readers not to overestimate their own knowledge or objectivity), they explain the ins and outs of lesser-known features, such as survivor and spousal benefits. Readers are also led through the decision of whether to claim early or delay retirement entirely, the intricacies of marital-status changes, and the options for those who are married, divorced, widowed, or single. The writing is detail heavy but clear enough for even the most intimidated reader, with a concluding cheat sheet helpfully summing up the book's suggestions. The authors' palpable fervor to help readers get back what they've paid will energize readers to claim what is rightfully theirs.
Customer Reviews
Does not cover my common situation
I took benefits at 66, because I am now self-employed and needed the extra money. My wife took her benefits after she was 62. She received half of what I received, but having both benefits was very helpful. She died last year and the Social Security benefits coming in were instantly reduced by one-third. (Living expenses do not go down by one-third when your spouse dies.). Unless I missed something, this book was NO help at all to me. It is all about strategies for maximizing income, if you can afford them. Probably helpful to some, but a waste of time for me.
Get WjHats Yours
This book was terrible obviously not worth the $$$ I paid for it all the information is on the I terror free. Obviously the authors were init for the money.