It's estimated that over 40% of retirees rely on Social Security income to meet at least half of their income needs in retirement.

But Social Security was never intended to fully fund your retirement needs, and in today's video,

I'm going to share why it's a mistake to rely too heavily on Social Security.

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.

There are four reasons.

This is a mistake, and the first reason is it will not help you with your one-time expenses.

Let's use an extreme example.

Let's assume that you have exactly $2,000 per month of expenses in retirement, and your Social Security benefit is also exactly $2,000 per month. All seems good. Your monthly bills, your utilities, your food, everything is covered until there's a one-time expense. This one-time expense could be a trip you want to take. This one-time expense could be property taxes. This one-time expense could be gifts you want to get. This one-time expense could be an emergency that comes up that

was unplanned for. Regardless of what it is, though, your Social Security benefit is a consistent

monthly income, which is great for those consistent monthly income needs, but it's not going to

help you account for those one-off expenses. Now, as obvious as this

probably sounds, I see too many people who when they're planning for the retirement, they look at

their monthly expenses. They look at credit card statements or bank statements and say, here's how

much I need in order to retire, and as soon as they come up with a way of supporting that income,

they go ahead and retire. So you can see how it might be easy for someone to say,

this is the amount I need to fully retire, and they've worked to the point that their social

security benefit now meets that need. Well, they retire, but then they forget those one-time

expenses, and when those one-time expenses come along, all they can do is put that on a credit

card or go into debt to afford it, and they're not going to have the means of paying that off while still maintaining their monthly standard of living.

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