What If Social Security is Cut? Here's What it Means for Your Retirement

Ready For Retirement

James Conole, CFP®

Investment Planning, Bonds, Education, Stocks, Cash, Business, Dividend Investing, Retirement Planning, Retirement, Investing, Tax Planning

5 • 706 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many middle-aged adults nearing retirement face anxiety over uncontrollable factors like Social Security cuts, lower investment returns, and increasing tax rates. Ari and James discuss how fear of these uncertainties can cause “analysis paralysis,” leading some to delay retirement unnecessarily. Instead of fixating on what cannot be controlled—like Congress or market behavior—they recommend proactive financial planning and modeling worst-case scenarios. For example, if Social Security were cu...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, James, what if Social Security gets reduced? Can I not retire? And also, by the way,
0:04.5	what if returns are way lower? And I might live to like 120 because I'm like super healthy.
0:09.4	And also, I don't know, but what if tax brackets go up? Does that mean I can't retire?
0:13.4	There's like so much going on in my head. I just want a simple yes or no. This is another episode of Ready for Retirement.
0:21.5	I'm your host, James Cannell, and I'm here to teach you how to get the most of the life with your money.
0:25.8	And now, on to the episode.
0:29.3	I know the last episode, we were going through a really simple example, and it was just so easy.
0:35.3	Why is that people make this retirement stuff so complicated?
0:39.1	Gosh, even as you say that, I'm like, you're in the headlights. Oh, man, it's doing you.
0:42.6	It gets complex really quickly. And I think that one inherent part of planning is that we are planning for so many things that are out of our control by the nature of what it is.
0:54.8	One of those things is Social Security, which we're going to talk about today.
0:59.3	Yeah.
0:59.5	I don't know if it's analysis paralysis or paralysis analysis, but either way, what we're going to be going through today is helping your brain go, what if Social Security does get reduced?
1:09.8	Would I still be okay? Because a lot of you go,
1:12.3	yeah, I've got a million bucks or two million or I'm going to have that amount, but there's still a million
1:17.3	things that could happen. So maybe I don't retire. And you know why you're doing that? Because it's
1:21.1	easier, because you're a human. And there becomes a point where James and I have to say, hey, I know you're going to keep working.
1:30.2	I know you could have more, but what about time with family?
1:31.6	What about prioritizing your health?
1:36.7	So we don't love provisional income policies and we don't love legislation.
1:41.9	We love that if you can use numbers wisely and plan efficiently, you get more time with your family and, you know, on the golf course or doing
1:44.6	whatever it is you want to do. So we're going to be walking you guys through a case study today.
	...

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