Get What's Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security - Hardcover

Social Security law has changed! Key secrets may require action before April 30, 2016. If you or your spouse turns 66 by then, you should read this book, and everyone should read updates on the authors' website, GetWhatsYours.org.

But even with the law changes, the book explains numerous secrets to maximizing your Social Security benefits that you can’t get anywhere else. And above all, Get What's Yours explains the lifetime payoff from waiting as long as possible.

To navigate the forbidding maze of Social Security and emerge with the highest possible benefits, you could try reading all 2,728 rules of the Social Security system (and the thousands of explanations of these rules). But Kotlikoff, Moeller, and Solman do the navigating for you, explaining Social Security benefits in an easy to understand and user-friendly style. What you don’t know can seriously hurt you: wrong decisions about which Social Security benefits to apply for cost some individual retirees thousands in lost income every year.

Get What’s Yours covers the most frequent benefit scenarios faced by married retired couples, by divorced retirees, by widows and widowers, among others. It explains what to do if you’re a retired parent of dependent children, disabled, or an eligible beneficiary who continues to work, and how to plan wisely before retirement. It addresses the tax consequences of your choices, as well as the financial implications for other investments.

Many personal finance books briefly address Social Security, but none offers the thorough, authoritative, yet conversational analysis found here.

Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University and president of Economic Security Planning, Inc. His company websites are ESPlanner.com and MaximizeMySocialSecurity.com. To learn more, visit GetWhatsYours.org.

Journalist Philip Moeller writes about retirement for Money and authors the Ask Phil Medicare column for PBS. He also is a Research Fellow at the Center on Aging & Work at Boston College and the founder of Insure.com, a leading site for insurance information.

Paul Solman is the business and economics correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and is a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at the International Security Studies department at Yale University.