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 of Ready for Retirement. I'm your

host, James Cannell. And we've got a good episode today. Today's episode, we're going to talk

about Medicare. And we're going to go in-depth into Medicare, because Medicare, if you've spent any time at all looking at it or exploring it, you've quickly

found. It can become very, very complex, very confusing. And there's just a lot of details that you

have to understand. So what we're going to do today is we're going to understand how do we take a

look at Medicare from the perspective of let's simplify it. Let's understand what

you need to know, what are the critical decision points that you need to make, and how you get an

understanding of how the system as a whole works so that you can make the best decision for yourself

in retirement. And make sure you stay tuned until the end, because at the end I'm going to provide

instructions on a free download I think will be really helpful for you called the simple three-step Medicare guide. That's going to tell you when, why, and how to choose a plan that's right for you,

and it will really help to simplify what can be a very complex subject. So again, instructions for

that, where you can find that will be found at the end of today's episode. Make sure you stay tuned

in until then. What we're going to be relying upon a lot in today's episode is one of my friends and a fellow financial planner named Ashby Daniels. He wrote a book called Medicare Simplified. And it's a great

book that just distills all the complexities of Medicare and presents it in a very clear,

understandable, and succinct, which is maybe the most important way. So Ashby, thank you very much.

We're actually going to use this book as the outline for

today. In fact, in parts of the episode, I'm just going to take snippets right from the book because it's

that good. And I think it does a tremendous job of helping people to understand what they need to know.

So with that being said, let's start with just what is Medicare. So Medicare, it's a federal health

insurance program and it's primarily

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