as we approach retirement age or certainly as we get into our 60s we quickly find out there's some
big decisions that are coming up that we need to really understand because it's going to impact us
the rest of our lives and the two major decisions one obviously medicare we need to understand
exactly how our health insurance is going to work in the future and then the other one is social
security and we need to really understand how to maximize our benefit so that we don't outlive our
income very important and very stressful for a lot of people so i'm gonna go through
the social security piece right now and talk about when to start taking social security and
things that you need to understand and i'm keith arnbrecht founder of medicare on video i help
people across the country make the right medicare choices i can absolutely help you as well if you
stay till the end i'll show you how to download my free book medicare made clear will make it so
much easier for you when it's time to make your medicare choices and when it is that time just
visit my website medicareonvideo.com put in your basic information and we will email you a quote
for the best medicare supplement plan in your zip code so it makes it very easy to get that done
now the next big piece in this day of retirement is social security and when do we take it and
what's the right time should i take it early should i take it later it can be very complicated
and hard to understand so there's a couple of big pieces that we really need to understand and first
piece of social security to understand is what's called full retirement age now it used to be
age 65 was when social security started well they changed that so they were living longer and
and so they have increased the age to what is your full retirement age and full retirement
age basically means full benefit age when your benefit is going to be at that hundred percent
mark so if you look at this chart here you can see it has incrementally changed these last few years
we're getting closer to the end of it right now so right now if you were born in 1960 or after your
full retirement age is 67 so no longer 65 it's now 67 and now the choice is i mean you can still take
your social security as early as age 62 but does that make sense and when you look at the chart
that they put out at social security it shows you exactly how that functions and when we look
at this chart it shows us you can see at age 67 there's no change so we can have our benefit 100
at age 67 and when you're looking at the monthly benefit number on this chart it varies so this is
kind of an average of it almost show you what mine looks like in just a minute where it's certainly
higher than this so you can max out bigger than what this number is but you can see on this chart
if you were to start at age 62 it's 30 percent less than what you would get at your full
retirement age so does it make sense to take it at age 62 because you'd have that check coming in
every month for five years so you know it's worth thinking about and understanding there's a couple
caveats here where we absolutely do not want to do that but you can see the difference in age
you know you may not know 62 but at 64 things might change 65 things might change
and it's just very important to understand the difference you can also see if you don't take it
at 67 and you wait until age 70 it's going to be a 24 increase in that number so i'm going to talk
about break even in just a second on if you took it early when would you break even you can see the
numbers over here on the side as well and again the difference of the numbers makes it a little
different my numbers are a little different on the break even i'll tell you those in just a second as
well but when you look at this it's important to understand exactly what we're trying to accomplish
now when we talk about taking it early big thing to understand is if you are still working
if you're still making income you're likely not going to want to take it early because
social security will penalize you for that pretty significantly so the line for income
while you're drawing social security before your full retirement age is nineteen thousand five
hundred sixty dollars so if you are making more than nineteen thousand five hundred dollars per
year you're not likely going to want to take social security because what's going to happen
is social security is going to take back a dollar for every two dollars you earn in social security
so 50 percent of your benefit for every dollar that you make over that thousand five hundred
dollars so that that's gone that's money that that you're giving back so you're making money and then
you're giving it back in your social security doesn't make any sense to take your social
security at 62 or 64 or 66 if your full retirement age is 67 if you still have adjusted gross income
and that's what it would come out to on your tax returns your adjusted gross income so we need to
understand that if we're still making money and working or have money coming in from other sources
that counts as adjusted gross income on our taxes we likely aren't going to want to take our social
security so that's certainly one reason i would never take it at 65. i would never take it at 62
because i still will have income coming in and i hopefully will have income coming in past for
retirement age but once you hit full retirement age then income's okay so but there's another
part of that we'll talk about in just a second so if you are working have income coming take
very seriously understand that nineteen thousand five hundred dollar limit and because you will
give that money back to social security and that just doesn't really make any sense now if you
are at full retirement age and you are still making income hopefully that will be the case
now we got to worry about taxes so does my social security get taxed and you would likely think
well no that that's something that you've already paid your taxes into and it's coming
back to you now why would they tax my social security well they do and it's based on income
and you can see how it works it can be up to 50 of your benefits so you have income levels of
25 000 to 34 000 for an individual or 32 to 44 000 for a married couple filing jointly
so it can be up to 85 percent of your social security check so if you make more than thirty
four thousand dollars individually or more than forty four thousand dollars as a couple
they're going to tax 85 of your social security benefit so it's just like getting the check from
an employer you're going to pay federal income tax on that social security amount so we need
to understand that because it can certainly affect our retirement choices same in medicare
you know if you make a certain amount of income medicare part b is income adjusted
medicare part d is income adjusted certainly understand that we're going to pay more
in our retirement if we still have what would be considered i guess significant income
over 44 000 as a joint filing couple which that's not quite considered significant in my book uh so
you can see that so if you're individual if you're if you have fifty thousand dollars in income
and you get fifteen hundred dollars a month from social security you would pay eighty five percent
you would pay taxes on your eighty-five percent of your eighteen thousand dollars in annual benefits
or fifteen thousand three hundred dollars so you're gonna pay taxes on that amount it can
make a significant difference now doesn't stop there if you live in one of these 12
states they add taxes under your social security and it's an interesting list of states it's not
the states that i would have thought that would have high tax rates but these states
also go after your social security if you make that same income so again important to
understand this stuff so you can plan accordingly now when we talk about distributions i'll show you
if you go to my social security you have an account called my social security and i'll put
the link in the description below in the video really easy to calculate the stuff it shows you
you know everything that you kind of need to know it shows you if you have your 40 credits in
if you know your income is correct from before and then it shows you a pretty good calculator
on how much you will get in social security you know whether you take it at 62 or 66 or 67 or 70
you can plug it in any way you want it and then this is mine you can see you know what you can do
with it and it's certainly a very helpful tool now my breakeven points come out to if i were
to take it at 62 but again i'll have income so i'm never going to take it at 62. but if i did
the time that it would take me as opposed to taking it at 67 where that break even comes into
play would be at age 76 and eight months so it's a long time and that also doesn't take into account
you know let's say you took it at 62 and you just invested it and didn't spend it and how
much that investment will add on to your income going forward it would increase that
break-even point for sure now if i took it at age 65 versus 67 my break even wouldn't come until 78.
so again that's 11 years before it's going to break even but we have to think about you know
how long are we going to live and you know every month after age 78 we would want that increased
amount for sure uh you know my mom is currently in her upper 80s and you know it's very likely these
days that we're going to live into our 90s and unless we have some real serious family history
you know we can almost look to that fact now certainly we can go quicker than that but we gotta
play the long game and to kind of rather be safe than sorry now the other choice is do you take it
at full retirement age or do you wait until age 70 70 is the maximum that you can take for social
security so mine would be you can see here on the chart where at 67 my monthly amount is 30 47
and then at 870 would be 39 18. that's you know another 900 bucks a month that's pretty
significant so the break even on that for me would be at age 80 and six months so a little over 10
and a half years to break even but you know going forward 81 82.85 you know it'd be another 900 a
month and this also doesn't take into account cost of living increases so social security does
have cost of living increases they're usually pretty small two or three percent but it does
increase but obviously inflation and we know about inflation right now
uh it's going to play a part as we go down the road so you know these are just there's really
not a right or wrong answer so except for like at age 62 only if you are without income and you
need it to pay your rent and to pay your food bill and your electric bill and everything else
certainly something to consider but if you're still working and you have income
no you don't want to do that because they're going to take your social security money back it's like
just giving it back to them which would be wrong you know same at age 65 if it's before
full retirement age it's all on that income thing so if you make income you're not going
to want to do it if you don't and you need the money then absolutely it's probably a
pretty good idea so that's exactly where we stand on social security i hope this gives
you a pretty good idea definitely get into the my social security account play with it
understand it that way there aren't any surprises when we come down the road and again understanding
medicare big big deal because medicare is not free and we need to understand what it's going to cost
in our retirement age and especially if we make you know what is considered
substantial income and it's it's called irma where the income adjusts part b premiums part
d premiums and you know it can be a shock to some so certainly visit medicare on video dot com we'll
get you a quote on your medicare supplement plan i'm happy to help with all things medicare it's
what i do it's how i make my living there's no cost to you to let me help you so hopefully you'll
do that and i hope you found all this helpful stay tuned i'll show you how to download my book have
a great day thank you for taking the time to watch my video i hope you found it very helpful a couple
of other things that you'll find very helpful is first download a copy of my free book medicare
made clear i put a lot of time a lot of effort into this book you'll find it very helpful for
everything that you need for medicare now and in the future it has videos in the book has all the
links that you need for signing up and everything else that you'll need going forward so take just
a minute go to medicareonvideo.com forward slash free book you can download it right now and save
it on your computer you'll have it for now and in the future and then down the road when it's time
to renew your medicare supplement plan we always want to shop around so every year it makes sense
to do a medicare price check and i have a website specific to that www.medicarepricecheck.com
where we will compare your current plan and see if we can get the same plan at a lower price
and a lot of times we can do that so it makes sense to visit medicarepricecheck.com every year
we'll do a quick comparison let you know if it makes sense and then we take it from there hope
you found all this helpful have a fantastic day hey don't go anywhere these are some of my most
recent videos right here you can also find the link right below this video to download my book
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