Book Summary
Get What’s Yours tackles a problem most retirement books gloss over: Social Security is the largest source of retirement income for most Americans, and its rules are so complex that claiming at the wrong time can cost a retiree tens of thousands of dollars. The authors count 2,728 core rules in the system’s operating manual, and this book is their attempt to translate the ones that matter into plain English.
The core message is that when you claim matters as much as how much you earned. Claiming at 62 locks in a permanently reduced benefit; waiting until 70 increases it by roughly 8 percent a year after full retirement age. Around that central decision, the book walks through the strategies that can add thousands more: spousal benefits, survivor benefits, strategies for divorced retirees, benefits for widows and widowers, and the rules for people who keep working while collecting.
The book is organized by life situation rather than by rule number, so a married couple, a single retiree, or a widow can each find the chapters that apply to them. Worked examples show the math in dollars, not abstractions, and a concluding cheat sheet summarizes the key moves. For readers in the retirement-income lane, it pairs naturally with Wade Pfau’s broader planning framework in Retirement Planning Guidebook.
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Who is Laurence J. Kotlikoff?
Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University and one of the country’s leading experts on Social Security and retirement finance. He has written extensively on fiscal policy and has built software to help households optimize their claiming decisions. His co-authors bring complementary expertise: Philip Moeller is a journalist who has covered aging and retirement for years, and Paul Solman is the economics correspondent for PBS NewsHour. The three came to the book, by their own account, after discovering in conversation how little even well-informed people understood about the system they had paid into all their lives.
Lessons From Get What’s Yours
The first lesson is the cost of claiming early without a reason. The book’s examples show that for a healthy person with other income to live on, delaying benefits is often the best ‘investment’ available: a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted return of about 8 percent a year for each year of delay past full retirement age. The authors are blunt that most people claim too early because they overestimate their own knowledge and underestimate how long they will live.
The second lesson is that Social Security is a household decision, not an individual one. Spousal and survivor benefits mean that one partner’s claiming choice changes the other’s lifetime income, and the optimal strategy for a couple often looks nothing like the optimal strategy for either spouse alone. The book’s most valuable chapters are the ones that work through these joint decisions case by case.
The third lesson is to treat the rules as a system to navigate, not a verdict to accept. Strategies with names like ‘file and suspend’ and ‘start stop start’ sound like loopholes, but they are applications of the rules as written, and the book explains which ones still work, which ones Congress has closed, and how to check your own situation before acting.
Criticisms of the Book
The book’s age is its main drawback. The first edition appeared in 2015, and Congress changed key rules that same year: the Bipartisan Budget Act effectively ended the ‘file and suspend’ strategy for most new claimants. The revised and updated edition linked here reflects the 2016 law changes, but readers should still confirm current law before acting, and should treat any Social Security book as a starting point rather than the final word, since rules continue to change.
The book is also dense in places. The authors do their best to keep the tone conversational, but some chapters are necessarily thick with rules, exceptions, and arithmetic, and readers who want a quick answer may find themselves working harder than they expected. It is a reference to consult carefully, not a book to skim the night before you file.
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Who is This Book For?
This book is for anyone within about ten years of claiming Social Security, and especially for married couples, divorced retirees, and widows or widowers, whose claiming choices are the most complex and the most consequential. It is also a useful companion to broader retirement planning books like The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning, which cover the wider landscape of which this book handles one crucial corner in depth.
It is not for younger readers decades from retirement, for whom the rules will almost certainly change before they matter, or for readers who want investment advice. This book is about maximizing a government benefit, not about building a portfolio.
Final Thoughts
Get What’s Yours earns its reputation the old-fashioned way: it takes a subject most people find intimidating, explains it in dollars and concrete cases, and shows readers money they would otherwise have left on the table. If you are anywhere near retirement age, reading it before you file is one of the highest-return uses of a few hours that personal finance offers.
