Social Security Statement For 2024

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This is the Truth Network. Welcome to Finishing Well, brought to you by cardinalguide.com, with certified financial planner, Hans Scheil, best-selling author and financial planner, helping families finish well for over 40 years. On Finishing Well, we'll examine both biblical and practical knowledge to assist families in finishing well, including discussions on managing social security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments, and taxes.

Now let's get started with Finishing Well. So today on Finishing Well, we have a really, it's a fun time of year for us here at Finishing Well because it's the time of year that you get your Social Security Statement for 2024. And it is a plethora of amazing information that we want to share with you. And along the lines is fascinating to me that there are three basic benefits that you'll see if you look at your statement to your Social Security. Number one is retirement, which is very interestingly, the prodigal son got three benefits when he returned to the father. As you might recall, he was, he ran away, but when he came back, his father put on his coat, which was the first one of his benefits, like your retirement benefit.

It kind of has you covered, which Jesus' blood has as covered as the ultimate retirement that we're going to have. And then there's the second benefit of Social Security is disability. Like if you become disabled before you reach retirement age, you know, it can certainly supplement your income so that you'll be able to do that. And the second thing the son received was a ring, which that ring was a signet ring.

So he would have authority to do things and actually to spend his dad's money. So that's a, that's a beautiful thing. And the third benefit is actually the one I wanted to talk about the most was the third benefit in Social Security is a survivor benefit. In other words, after you pass away, if you're married, then in like in my case, Tammy will continue to get my Social Security check in as long as she lives. Cause it's the larger of the, of the retirement checks that we have. And it kind of gives me the same thing the father gave his son.

The third thing was a set of shoes. And you might remember biblically that your feet are fitted with a gospel of peace. And that idea of peace, uh, obviously gets to go on and on as people see that big smile on your face when you're coming. But also when it comes to this, you have peace that your surviving spouse, in this case, Tammy will have that check, you know, for the rest of her life. And so understanding the statement, understanding all of your benefits really is something you really need to begin to understand when you get older, right?

Absolutely. And we, it seems with some of these to at least me, um, in about the seventh year of doing shows that we get somewhat repetitive, but I never hear that from the audience. So this one on Social Security, this time of year, we always pull up our statements. We get our clients to pull up their statements if they haven't filed yet and, um, you get them to pull them up on their spouse.

And I discovered this year that we have not done one on my wife. Um, we just haven't opened up an account. So I think I'll tell everybody you go to ssa.gov. That's the social security administration, that government or ssa.gov. And what you're wanting to open up is on my social security account.

And you just do the user ID and password thing. And then once you're, you're going to need this and it saves you trips down to the social security office where you can actually do the stuff online. And if you come to us, this is one of the first things we're going to ask for. If we're going to do financial planning, retirement planning, even on the phone, before we get started with that, I want to see your social security statement.

Um, I want to send, I want you to send it to me. And what I'm really looking at is that full retirement age benefit, which for me is 66 and eight months, because I was born in 1958. And so I'm still not there yet. I'm about a year away from that. People born in 1959 is 66 and 10 months and people born 1960 and after is 67 is their full retirement age. And on your social security statement, it's going to give you the amount that you can collect at full retirement.

And so the decision that people have, and if you haven't filed for years yet, the decision you have is when do I file? And it just amazes me how quickly and easily people will make this decision without understanding the lifelong ramifications of taking it earlier maybe than they had to. So, and I'm not an all the time proponent of always delay as long as you can, preferably to 70 because social security is there to provide a safety net and to provide some level of income for everybody who worked and who's the spouse of who worked. And so if you're 62 or 63 and 64 something, some bad things have come your way, misfortunes, and you don't have retirement savings and you just need the money to live, well then go ahead and take it.

I mean, I'm not finding any fault with those people. And in fact, if you want us to explain all of that, I'd be glad to help anybody, even the people that don't have really any resources to plan with. You know, I consider that part of my job and my calling to help people make these decisions. But who I'm talking to are the people who have other retirement money, they have retirement savings, and so they have the option, if they're retired, to live off of the retirement savings for just a few years and then delay the social security. And I'm not telling everybody carte blanche do that. I'm just saying that consider that with a professional looking at the whole thing for you.

So am I making sense, Robbie? Yeah, it's hugely like, when you look at that statement, it kind of glares out at you like, wait, if I take my social security now, if I recall, you know, back when I first time you showed me this, which I had never really paid any attention to it until you told me to print it. And when I printed it that first time, I think it showed my retirement at that time, and I might have been 64 or something at the time, was like $25,000, you know, per month. I mean, yeah, I'm sorry, 2500.

Yeah, I would have been good. Yeah, like 2500 a month. But if I waited it, it grew to like $3,600 a month. And I remember going, Oh, my goodness, man, there's $1,000 a month is a whole lot of money.

And really, the difference between the way I live one way versus the way I live another. And so waiting became just hugely attractive. But I realized that, you know, for me, I was working.

And that was made it easier to wait longer. But for those who aren't working, right there, there's alternatives we're going to talk about later in the show today as well, right? Well, yeah, I, I have a number of people coming to me, who are leaving their job, they're retiring. Maybe they've already done it.

They're planning it in the next few months. And they've got these very large retirement savings accounts. In fact, that's generally the bulk of their savings, in their money.

And some of these accounts are really large. And they, they've benefited from the stock market, they've put the maximum away, and the stock market has just been cooking for years. And now all of a sudden, they're approaching retirement, and what really scares them is stopping the paychecks.

They've been living off their paycheck, of which they only get about half of it or 60% of it, and the rest is withheld. And so they're thinking they need to replace that in retirement, and maybe they do. And it just kind of then they look at this big bucket of money. And they're saying, well, you know, if I start drawing out my old salary out of that, and paying all the taxes, I'm gonna be out of money when I'm 80 years old.

So it's, it's scary business. And the Social Security is kind of at the core of this. And we have a lot of people who have already taken the check early, just so they got some money coming in.

So they do it on both spouses. Like I'm looking at the Social Security statement we used in the example, 65 and six months. This person is entitled to 3,464 a month. So in other words, that's if you took if you took it right now. And then it's 66 and eight months, which is his full retirement.

It's just 3,786 a month. And so if this person was retiring right now, and, you know, they just say, Well, why am I going to wait a year and a half for 300 bucks a month, for 350, or whatever. And so just based on that, they kind of looked at it, so I'm taking it now.

And I mean, I have people that literally make the decision with that much thought, is they just looked at a couple of numbers, and they said, I'm going to take it. And this person, having made a high income to get this big of a Social Security check, presumably has a big stash of pre tax retirement money that he really doesn't really want to take out of. And he's gonna have to take some out to go with the Social Security check, but he wants to keep that as a minimum. And then his wife, or his spouse, you know, personally, he's going to take out, you know, her Social Security checks about 800 a month. Now she can get half of his benefit early, so she could really get like 1700 a month, because his benefit is 3,464. So they get over five grand a month, and they say we're taking it.

Okay. And to some degree, it's hard to argue with that just using simple math. Especially a lot of these people, they don't spend a huge amount of money. And there's this other money's there, and they're a bit conflicted. And what my thinking is, is when we get all done doing the financial plan, we're going to consider we're not going to do for sure, but we're going to consider talking to this guy about waiting till he's 70, where he'll collect 4,882 a month. Okay, so now you're comparing 3400 a month at 65 and six months to 4,882 at 70.

Now you wait four and a half years, and you get 1400 a month for life. Yeah. Yeah. And we have got to go to a break, but we wanted to remind you, and we got a whole lot more coming on that whole idea. And more reasons that you ought to print that statement. But we want to remind you that the show is brought to you by cardinalguide.com. And there at cardinalguide.com are the seven worries tab in today's social security. It's actually the number one worry tab, because it's kind of the basis on how much of your retirement is going to be planned.

So this critical stuff we're talking about today. And again, we've got all sorts of resources there under the social security tab, as well as a video that they've done with show notes. And on those show notes shows all of what we're talking about how you can print your statement, etc, as well as of course, Hans' book, The Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for a Living Retirement, and all the contact information is all there at cardinalguide.com. So when we come back, we got a whole lot more coming on your 2024 social security statement.

We'll be right back. Investment Advisory Services offered through Brookstone Capital Management LLC, abbreviated BCM, a registered investment advisor. BCM and Cardinal Advisors are independent of each other.

Insurance products and services are not offered through BCM, but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents. Cardinal Advisors is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration or any other government agency. Welcome back to Finishing Well with today's show, your 2024 social security statement. And oh, what a plethora of information, helpful, helpful information, really just even to understand to some extent what your social security is about because there's all sorts of really great information there. But also Hans has got some other plans for you coming up in today's show. So Hans, take it away.

Yes. So we were talking about this example where we had $3,464 a month available to this man at 65 and six months, which a lot of people retire right around 65, especially those that have resources that are going on Medicare. You know, they just don't want to wait any longer. They don't really have to. And we've got this big retirement account that we're going to need to pay taxes on. But, you know, it's sufficient, along with Social Security, to produce a nice lifestyle.

So people retire here, they got the health insurance taken care of. And in this example, the fellow spouse, she hadn't worked a lot. She worked some and so she's got like a $900, $920 a month Social Security benefit at her full retirement, which is 67, or 66 and 10 months. And she also has, she could get about 800 a month now. And so you put those two things together, and he could get 5,200, excuse me, 4,300 a month, 4,200 a month, right now, between the two of them. And they're thinking, well, why not?

And so when I look at this whole thing, and I say, you know, this guy is just on the surface, he's, we see a lot of people, and we see a lot of people doing this, where they take it a little bit early, because they just want something coming in. Because that whole big glob of money doesn't really have any income purpose for them. They've never drawn anything out of it. They've just been accumulated. And so what we come up with is a five-year paycheck that just essentially duplicates the income of Social Security. So, you know, the way this works is this guy could put in $266,633 out of his more than a million size IRA. Just transfer it over there, and it's going to send him a check for his 870 benefit of 4,882 for five years, okay? And so it's about four and a half percent interest that's built in. So you're not going to get rich doing this with the annuity, but they're going to send them a check that every month, 4,882, and it's even going to go past his full retirement. The shortest we can write these is five years.

But we're doing this with a lot of people. So it takes $266,000 for him out of his retirement account for him to move the clock ahead four and a half years to the full age retirement. And you're thinking, why in the world would he want to do that?

Well, let's back up a minute. If he just wanted to replace the $3,460 that he could get now, it would only take about two-thirds of the $266,000. So he could get away with about $170,000, $180,000. He could replace the current social security check, and then he'd have a much larger check at $70,000. I mean, the same checks with social security is going to be the same at $70,000 no matter what is the route. But it's just a scientific way to pull some money out of his IRA. It's not taxed until it's actually paid to him.

And we find a lot of people are doing this because it just, you know, it takes that word. They've got a check coming in. It can look like social security.

It's not coming from the government. And how this changes the whole picture for retirement is now he's got $4,882 coming in, and then his spouse or his wife who had this small social security check, she's going to be able to get half of his full age retirement benefit, about $1,800. So now they're going to have like $6,600 a month coming in for the rest of their life.

The rest of both of their lives. So let's talk about the survivor for a minute. So why don't you tell me how the survivor benefit works? Yeah, it's a critical aspect, especially for those of us like Tammy's eight years younger than I am. And so that's a big consideration for a lot of folks. It is for me that, you know, long after I'm gone, you know, by waiting as I did on my social security, you know, it not only obviously, you know, helped me and in the case of this couple that's helping them, but it is we talked about that piece of knowing that, you know, that that amount for us right now, for the way that Tammy and I live, can, in my opinion, that alone without any other income of any other kind, and hopefully she'll have a lot more other kinds. But at least I know that her social security alone will take care of what she what, you know, what her normal needs would be because we waited, right?

Well, and so you've locked in this higher amount. I mean, let's say you get old age and things just haven't, when I say old age, you're up in your 80s and 90s, one of you or both of you, and maybe things with your investments and your planning and your spending and things that happened to you just haven't worked out the way you thought they were. And now all of a sudden, you've got this higher social security check.

And it's not all of a sudden, you've had it since you were 70. But when you run the numbers on this kind of stuff, yet past full retirement age, you're getting 8% on your money for waiting. Okay, I mean, that's the government is adding that now it's, it's not as simple as that. But when you do all the calculations, and you come up with the value of it, it's like getting 8% return on your money. So pulling this money out of the IRA for this guy, and then waiting four and a half years to actually start Social Security to get a larger amount for life.

He's also taken some risk off the table because when he throws this amount of money in doesn't go up and down. So what I want to reiterate is the larger Social Security check for this guy at 4882. It's just like where you had talked about with your wife. If this guy doesn't make it past 80 or whatever, and his wife lives to 95. She's going to be real happy.

And he's going to be happy knowing that it's effectively like life insurance, where she's going to have to live off of one check. And it's certainly nice for that to be as big as it can possibly be. Yeah, and and to me, it just is fascinating. How much information is on that little statement that I had never printed? Or, you know, maybe I looked at it before and came in the mail, but I had no consideration of all the wonderful information that's really just on this report that's been available for us all time, right? Yeah, if you go on our YouTube channel, Cardinal Advisors, Hans Schile, you can find it just googling on YouTube, or just searching on YouTube. And you go there and you look this up. There's a video that goes through all of this, but there's also show notes. And the sample statement I'm talking about is right there.

Yeah, you know, that's the only show note we really have is the sample statement. I want to point this out, you got a higher amount if you delay, that's going to get this the increased inflated benefits. I mean, the inflation is going to happen on the thing on a higher amount. The benefits is going to the benefits of a larger check are going to last as long as either one of you do. So it also could be that your wife was able to go first, Robbie, and then you live on but at least you're living on with a sizable check because her checks stop them after she passes away. So either spouse could live on with this larger check.

Yeah, because they're going to be taxed. Now, we can do some planning for that to try to reduce the taxes on your social security down to very low if some things line up properly. So you know, you need to learn what your full retirement age is. You need to get a hold of this statement.

And if you haven't done it lately, if you've gotten in the past, go get the fresh one up. And you bring that into me. You give me a call. We work in all 50 states in the District of Columbia.

So we can work with you anywhere in the United States. Yeah, because there's the other angle to it is that when you're left either by yourself or you leave your spouse by herself, the taxes are a completely different deal. And so since social security benefits by themselves are not taxed, I mean, that's a big, big benefit because here comes, because like I say, you're in a higher income. You're in a completely different bracket because you're not any longer filing jointly. That's all the more reason that you need that stable income, right?

Oh, sure. And so, you know, you put this together with Roth conversions, maybe some life insurance cash value that you build up as a savings account. And social security is taxed to the extent of your other income. So when you've got a couple of pretty nice social security checks coming in, and then you've got some other income, whether it's out of a Roth, which is not taxable, or it's out of a taxable account, that's kept to a smallish amount. You can be in a situation where, this guy could, where he pays very little taxes year to year.

And then the point being that when one of them dies and the other one lives on and they're a single taxpayer, not only do they have reduced social security checks, but they're actually going to pay more income taxes because the brackets are much less favorable for single people. Well, unfortunately run out of time again, but we want to remind you again that the show is brought to you by Cardinal guide, cardinal guide.com, where again, they have the seven worries tab. And that one of those seven worries are the first one actually is social security, where you have all kinds of information, including a video there on this whole idea of the 2024 statement shows you how to get it on the IRS website, et cetera, et cetera. And also there at his website, you'll find a complete Cardinal guide to planning for and living in retirement.

That's Hans's book. And of course that contact information and his, as Han said, he would love to go over your statement with you, help you understand those things and begin that process of planning that for you and not with a cookie cutter approach, but based on your needs so much fun, Hans, great talking to you. All right. Thank you.

And God bless you. The opinions expressed by Han Shile and guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of this radio station. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable, although it should not be relied upon as such.

Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated or not guaranteed past performance cannot be used as an indicator to determine future results. Any strategies mentioned may not be suitable for everyone. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for you. Before acting on any information mentioned, please consult with a qualified tax or investment advisor to determine if it's suitable for your specific situation.

Finishing well is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject covered. Investment advisory services offered through Brookstone Capital Management LLC, abbreviated BCM, a registered investment advisor. BCM and Cardinal Advisors are independent of each other.

Insurance products and services are not offered through BCM but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents. Cardinal Advisors is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration or any other government agency. We hope you enjoyed Finishing Well, brought to you by cardinalguide.com. Visit cardinalguide.com for free downloads of this show or previous shows on topics such as Social Security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments, and taxes, as well as Hans' best-selling book, The Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement, and The Workbook, once again, for dozens of free resources, past shows, or to get Hans' book, go to cardinalguide.com. If you have a question, comment, or suggestion for future shows, click on The Finishing Well radio show on the website and send us a word. Once again, that's cardinalguide.com. Cardinalguide.com. This is the Truth Network.