If you've ever wanted an introduction to Social Security with just straight facts and no nonsense,

stick around for this, the 25th episode of the Retirement Planning Education Podcast.

Welcome to the Retirement Planning Education Podcast, where you can learn all about IRAs and Roth IRAs,

employer retirement plans, taxes, social security, Medicare,

portfolio withdrawal strategies, annuities, estate planning, and much more. And now here's your host,

Andy Panko. All right, welcome, welcome, everyone. Thank you, as always, for listening. We got a

fun one today. I'll be talking about social security. Huge topic. I'm going to break it down and

consider this the intro to social security. I'll give you some background, some facts and

figures, the basics of the system. And in future episodes, I'll dig more into specifics that

you're probably interested about, such as when should I take Social

Security, that's probably the most common question they get about Social Security, and also

explain some other things about survivor benefits, spousal benefits, benefits for children, and

some other things to consider, as well as taxation, maybe it might get into that. So I haven't quite

specced out exactly how many episodes this

will be. Today is definitely an intro. We'll see how the time's going. If it's much longer than a

half hour after I'm running through this, I'll stop and cut the rest to another one. But future

episodes nonetheless will be just so you know, again, things like when should I take Social

Security or, you know, deeper dive into some of the things we'll talk about today.

Today is really just an intro, fairly high level.

Social Security has a sweet spot in my heart because it's really what brought me into doing retirement planning.

For, you know, for those of you don't know, the almost 20 years prior to me starting this, this, my retirement planning business, I was in

corporate and institutional investment banking. Still working around investments, worked in

...