On January 5th, former President Joe Biden signed into law the Social Security Fairness Act.

For some, this will increase their Social Security benefit by over $1,000 per month.

But for others, it could end up costing them in the long term.

Today, I'm going to walk through exactly what the bill did, give you an example so you can

see what's changing between previous law and now, and then walk you through both the pros and

the cons of this new bill.

This is another episode of Ready for Retirement. I'm your host, James Cannell, and I'm here to teach you how to get the most of the life with your money.

And now, on to the episode. For some basic background, they've been pushing to change Social Security laws for about 40 years now.

Now, they tossed out things like raising the retirement age.

They talked about other factors.

And to be clear, some of those things may still be coming in the future.

But what this specific bill did is it repealed the windfall elimination provision, as well as the government pension offset.

The windfall elimination provision, you probably see it abbreviated

as WEP, and the government pension offset, you see abbreviated as GPO. What those have to do with

is those have to do with the Social Security benefits that people with non-covered pensions receive.

Now, even if that's not you, stay tuned because I'm going to walk through the implications for

everybody as part of this video. Let's use an example to show you exactly how this works. Let's use Maria. Maria is a public school

teacher in California. Now, California is one of 15 states across the country that does not have

its teachers pay into Social Security. What does that mean? It means they're not paying Social Security

taxes are 6.2% of every dollar that you earn up to a cap, nor is the school

matching those contributions. Those are part of payroll taxes, and that's how Social Security is

funded. So for these teachers in California and 15 other states or 14 other states, 15 total,

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