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Get What's Yours

The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security 


(Part of The Get What's Yours Series)
By Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Philip Moeller and Paul Solman
Social Security law has changed! Get What’s Yours has been revised and updated to reflect new regulations that took effect on April 29, 2016.

Get What’s Yours has proven itself to be the definitive book about how to navigate the forbidding maze of Social Security and emerge with the highest possible benefits. It is an engaging manual of tactics and strategies written by well-known financial commentators that is unobtainable elsewhere. You could try reading all 2,728 rules of the Social Security system (and the thousands of explanations of these rules), but academia’s Kotlikoff, the popular press’s Moeller, and public television’s Solman explain the Social Security system just as comprehensively, and a lot more comprehensibly. Moreover, they demonstrate that what you don’t know can seriously hurt you: wrong decisions about which Social Security benefits to apply for cost individual retirees tens of thousands of dollars in lost income every year. (Some of those people are even in the book.)

Changes to Social Security that take effect in 2016 make it more important than ever to wait as long as possible (until age 70, if possible) to claim Social Security benefits. The new law also has significant implications for those who wish to claim divorced spousal benefits (and how many Social Security recipients even know about divorced spousal benefits?). Besides addressing these and other issues, this revised edition contains a chapter explaining how Medicare rules can shape Social Security decisions.

Many other personal-finance books briefly address Social Security, but none offers the full, authoritative, yet conversational analysis of Get What’s Yours.

Get What’s Yours explains Social Security benefits through basic strategies and stirring stories. It covers the most frequent benefit scenarios faced by married retired couples; by divorced retirees; by widows and widowers. It explains what to do if you’re a retired parent of dependent children; disabled; an eligible beneficiary who continues to work. It addresses the tax consequences of your choices, as well as the financial implications for other investments. It does all this and more.

There are more than 52 million Americans aged 54 to 69. Ten thousand of them reach Social Security’s full retirement age of 66 every day. For all these people—and for their families and friends—Get What’s Yours has proven to be an invaluable, and therefore indispensable, tool.




List Price $10.99 (price may vary by retailer)





“Getting smart about Social Security can put tens of thousands of extra dollars in your pocket. With that in mind, start by reading, Get What’s Yours. . . . The book translates—into often-entertaining English—the many convoluted rules that make up the Social Security program. . . . [Does] a great job of helping you make sense of, and get the most from, Social Security. . . . Invaluable.”
– Glenn Ruffenach, The Wall Street Journal
 For the Divorced: 2 Popular Social Security Questions Answered

Posted on Tips on Life & Love

Posted by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Philip Moeller and Paul Solman

If you were married for 10 years or more, you can collect a spousal benefit based on your ex's earning record, as long as you're both 62 or older and either: a) your ex has filed for his or her retirement benefit or b) you have been divorced for...
 Spend 'Til the End
By Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns Generational Accounting
By Laurence J. Kotlikoff Get What's Yours for Medicare
By Philip Moeller


“The indispensable guide to Medicare that does for this essential program what Get What’s Yours does for Social Security.”
– Jane Bryant Quinn, author of How to Make Your Money Last and Making the Most of Your Money Now
 Photograph by Angela Tucker

Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University and president of Economic Security Planning, Inc. His company websites are ESPlanner.com and MaximizeMySocialSecurity.com. To learn more, visit GetWhatsYours.org. Photograph by Maguire Neblett

Philip Moeller

Journalist Philip Moeller writes about retirement for Money and authors the Ask Phil Medicare column for PBS. He also is a Research Fellow at the Center on Aging & Work at Boston College and the founder of Insure.com, a leading site for insurance information. Photograph by Robert Severi

Paul Solman

Paul Solman is the business and economics correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and is a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at the International Security Studies department at Yale University.






