Kotlikoff, Moeller, and Solman's Get What’s Yours:The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security Revised Summary

Revised March 2016, this is is a summary and analysis of the book, Get What's Yours: The Secrets to Maximizing Out Your Social Security by Laurence Kotlikoff, Phillip Moeller and Paul Solman.

Social Security has always been a hot topic in the United States. Every year the US government doles out hundreds and billions of dollars in benefits and social insurance. As a citizen, it's your responsibility to know and understand how this program works. Unfortunately, despite being one of the biggest federal programs implemented by the government, it's also one of the most complicated and convoluted to understand.

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.

This summary includes a critique of the book's messages, presents information from other studies that discuss current and future state of Social Security, as well as a quick reference list of planning tips to help Maximize Social Security Benefits.

Available in a variety of formats, this summary is aimed for those who want to capture the gist of the book but don't have the current time to devour all 337 pages. You get the main summary along with all of the benefits and lessons the actual book has to offer. This is a summary that is not intended to be used without reference to the original book.