Discover the tips and strategies that will help you achieve your retirement goals.

I'm your host, James Canole, and this is the podcast dedicated to helping you retire well.

It all starts right here on Ready for Retirement. for retirement.

Hi, everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of Ready for Retirement.

I'm your host, James Knoll.

And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about how you can maximize social security.

And not in the traditional sense of, yes, James, I know,

the longer I wait to collect social security, the more I get. And that's typically where people

go when it comes to understanding how to maximize social security. But that is looking at

social security and a collection strategy in a very limited scope. I'm kind of looking at it in a

vacuum without considering everything

else that it impacts as part of a comprehensive financial plan. So the question today comes from

Kevin. And Kevin says this. He says, I understand that delaying social security will result in an

increase in benefits and that the break even is roughly in the early 80s. However, isn't that break even

for the cumulative amount,

ignoring the potential return on investments? For example, if claiming at 62, that means I don't

need to withdraw that amount for my own investments. Let's say those investments grow at 5% or 6%.

Even though the benefit at 70 would be larger, the compounding from claiming at 62 might make the break

even much, much longer. I think with some back of the envelope calculations, once you can get above

a 4% return in your investments, you'll always be better off claiming early. This ignores other

taxes so that could still come into play, but am I missing other considerations? Assume when I could

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