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Hello everyone and welcome to the Big Picture Retirement Show, where we deliver insight on what you need to know for a meaningful and successful retirement. If you are planning

for or living in retirement, this is the show for you. I'm Devin and with me today is John Ross. Hey John.

Howdy!

John, there's some age-old questions that have been asked for eons, things such as, what came

first, the chicken or the egg? And folks have grappled with these questions and tried to answer

them. It's the unanswerable philosophical question. Oh, yes. There's several others out there.

What is love? Can you think of any more? Oh, I could probably think of several.

Well, there was some out there. The tree falls in the woods, right? That's true, yeah. One of those that

should be added to that list is what's the best stage to file for Social Security? I've been asked

this more times than I can possibly count. Oh, yeah. Likewise. I think it's the number one question that I'm asked on Social Security. Well, particularly with your Social Security intelligence website and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, you get this question all the time. And I know that a lot of our listeners aren't getting ready to file for Social Security, but they either know someone who is, they have a parent

who is, a friend, family member, whatever the case may be, or they're just wanting to put it in

their plans. So I thought this would be an important topic for us to tackle and wrestle with

a little bit ourselves today. Right. And it's an easy question, right? You figure out the exact

moment of death and then calculate backwards.

That's right. Yeah. If you knew all of that, you certainly could. But we'll go into some of the reasons why maybe a break-even analysis isn't the best way to look at this either.

I know when I was starting out and this question would come up. In fact, this topic would come up even in like an undergraduate accounting program. They might even use this as an exam question. You know, person's going to

retire at X date. They could either retire at this date or this date. They would get this amount

on this date or this amount on this date. And at what point would they be better off going with option one or option

two? Yeah. And essentially drawing two lines across a timeline and seeing where those two lines

intersected and going down. And then we get out of the real world. And in fact, as I deal with

...