Social Security Timing: Reframing Your Thinking For Better Decision-Making

Social Security Timing: Reframing Your Thinking For Better Decision-Making

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The Smart Take:

Your brain uses mental shortcuts to help solve problems. While shortcuts can be quite helpful in many aspects of daily life, in other areas shortcuts may harm your decision-making. Social Security claiming is often one of these negatively impacted areas.

In this episode, hear Tyler Emrick, CFA®, CFP®, discuss the mental shortcuts (aka cognitive biases) at play when deciding to take your Social Security benefits. Being cognizant and acting with a more prudent decision-making process will likely help you realize a better outcome and improved retirement.

Here’s some of what we discuss in this episode:

  • Optimism and pessimism bias can skew our judgments when making decisions.
  • Present bias and temporal discounting. In the context of Social Security, this means favoring smaller payments now over larger payments later, a decision that can significantly impact long-term financial health.
  • The anchoring effect is another critical bias discussed. This occurs when individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information they encounter—such as the earliest age they can claim Social Security—making it challenging to adjust their plans with new information.
  • Tyler explains the concept of delayed retirement credits and how Social Security benefits are designed to be actuarially equivalent, regardless of when you start claiming them.
  • How Social Security is uniquely impacted by inflation and interest rates.

 

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The Hosts:

Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA – About – Contact

Tyler Emrick, CFA®, CFP® – About – Contact

Episode Transcript:

Tyler Emrick:

Coming up today on Retire Smarter, we dive into social security planning, discussing the mental shortcuts at play when trying to make that oh so important decision of when to start social security benefits.

Walter Storholt:

It’s another edition of Retire Smarter. Walter Storholt here, with Tyler Emrick, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER and chartered financial analyst at True Wealth Design. Find us online at truewealthdesign.com.

Tyler, this is the show that almost didn’t happen due to travel snafus, but we got it in under the gun, my friend.

Tyler Emrick:

It’s true, it’s true. I thought I was going to be stuck overnight in Chicago and ended up getting in early, early in the morning the next day, a little after 3:00.

Walter Storholt:

You might as well have spent the night in Chicago.

Tyler Emrick:

That’s true, that’s true. Not a bad city, for any listeners we got in Chicago. Love the city. Made for a long night at the airport, that’s for sure.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

But we’re here now, we’re ready to go. Although, I look out the window, Walt, and we got a pretty good storm coming.

Walter Storholt:

Ah.

Tyler Emrick:

Right before we got on and jumped on for the podcast, a big bolt of lightning came in and actually knocked out power for a second.

Walter Storholt:

Oh my gosh.

Tyler Emrick:

Scared me to death.

Walter Storholt:

With our luck this week, we’re going to get about 15 minutes of an episode and have to wrap it up there, or do the rest of it via cellphone, or something wild like that.

Tyler Emrick:

I know, that’s right. Well, if we get cut out and people are like, “Wow, why did Tyler just stop talking and then pick up again on the cut,” that’s the reasoning. Podcast went out, microphone gone, and we’re there. But we’ll see how far we get.

Walter Storholt:

I’m going to start blaming all of my editing mistakes on lightning. “Hey, Walt, you left in a big goof halfway through the show.” Yeah, lightning. Lightning did it. It was lightning’s fault.

Tyler Emrick:

Hey, I like it. I like it.

Walter Storholt:

Awesome, awesome. Well, let’s see if we can make it through the show without any major hazards and get you back to smooth sailing, to piggyback off of your airplane trip this week.

Tyler Emrick:

That’s fair. We got, I think, a fun topic today. Social security’s always a good one. You know how we always try to approach some of these topics that are always top of mind for our retirees, or individuals that are approaching retirement. Social security is a big one. We always get quite a bit of questions about it. Again, trying to look at it through a different lens or approach it a different way.

What prompted, I guess, the show notes for today was something came across my desk, an article, that talked a little bit about life expectancy.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

And making that decision around social security, and getting down to the crux of a break even age, and how long do you have to actually live to break even with your social security claiming strategy.

When I say break even, I guess maybe some listeners might be like, “What the heck are you talking about?” Essentially, all it is, is that point at which your total benefits received from starting social security early, say it’s age 62, would be equal to those received if you were to start later. Essentially, I guess the gist of it would be hey, you have to live to a certain age to make waiting to take your social security beneficial and worth it.

Of course, if you could tell me when you’re going to pass, I could tell you when exactly should be the time you’re taking your social security. But of course, Walt, we don’t have that crystal ball to be able to tell us.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. I think that’s the crux of any financial planning element. If we know when X is going to happen, we can then easily plan it. But the X is always so unknown for many of the solutions in retirement planning and financial planning that yeah, it requires these flexible choices, these decisions that morph over time as the situation changes.

I’m interested too, in how you talk about mental shortcuts as it relates to social security timing. I’m interested to see how you connect those dots, too.

Tyler Emrick:

Oh, you got it, because that was the gist of the article. I was going into this, and basically, they started the article saying, “Hey, social security data suggests the average mortality age is seven to nine years beyond the breakeven age.” Meaning that people will live significantly longer than they expect. Then they got down in-

Walter Storholt:

A good thing.

Tyler Emrick:

Oh, absolutely. A really good thing.

Walter Storholt:

For those living that long.

Tyler Emrick:

Yes. But it was trying to approach it from that other side of why does everybody seem to think that they’re not going to live as long as they’d like?

What happens, or what I thought was very fascinating, is they went down into the actual reasoning for it. I guess the technical term for this is called a cognitive bias. Which, by definition, is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people process and interpret information in their surroundings, influencing their decisions and judgements. That is a mouthful, to say the least.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

I think we came up with a good shortcut.

Walter Storholt:

I almost feel like I should trigger the egghead alert on you for that.

Tyler Emrick:

Yeah.

Walter Storholt:

But those weren’t your words, they were the words of the article, right?

Tyler Emrick:

Definition. Definition. We’re going to just refer to them as mental shortcuts from now on, because I think it gets the crux at what they’re trying to say. We’re going to just rattle through a few of these, so that way our listeners can be aware of them and reflect on their situation. And say hey, are they approaching this social security decision with some of these biases or mental shortcuts in mind? Towards the end of the pod, I think I have a couple comments around maybe a little different way to be thinking about social security as well. Yeah, we’ll see where it takes us and where we end up going, but let’s dive in.

We’ll get into the very first one here, which is availability heuristic.

Speaker 3:

Egghead alert.

Walter Storholt:

All right. What in the world is heuristic? I even get to see the spelling of it on here. I knew that one was coming, I already queued it up.

Tyler Emrick:

Hey, I had to look up, I wanted to make sure I was pronouncing it the right way, too. If anybody’s listening and coming back at me, if I butchered that, then hey, so be it. Don’t hold it against me, please.

Essentially, it’s saying-

Walter Storholt:

Hold on. Heuristic? Am I pronouncing that?

Tyler Emrick:

We’re not going down into the details on it. Heuristic.

Walter Storholt:

H-E-U-R-I-S-T-I-C.

Tyler Emrick:

That’s right.

Walter Storholt:

Availability heuristic. All right, go ahead.

Tyler Emrick:

Correct. What it does is it’s essentially getting to the fact that we often rely on immediate examples that come to mind when considering a specific topic or decision.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

Like the untimely death of a family member or a friend, or media coverage of premature deaths. Since those are sticking with us a little bit more, they’re more memorable and emotionally more impactful. They skew the way that we think. We’re not really taking inventory of all the individuals that live well into their 80s and 90s. What’s really sticking with us are those tragic events or those scenarios where someone passed early.

When I read that first one, what popped into my mind was actually my conversations with my wife that I have all the time. I don’t know if I said this before. My wife’s a nurse practitioner, a women’s health nurse practitioner, and she works in oncology specifically with high risk breast cancer patients. Walt, day in and day out, she’s meeting with high risk breast cancer patients, that have had it in the past or have a high likelihood of it. I think at the hospital system that she’s at, which is very, very prevalent and very large here in the Cleveland area, there’s only four individuals in her area that do this. They’re seeing and servicing a wide area.

As you can imagine, it’s a small population of the overall area here that are coming to see her. But in her mind, it’s one right after another. She loves her job, but she always tends to skew. Especially for health issues that might come up with the kids or whatever, her mind goes right to that worst case scenario. She always talks about how it can wear on her, seeing one over another. Loves her job, but it certainly skews that view to where, well hey, breast cancer might seem more prevalent to her than what it is actually statistically.

Walter Storholt:

Because that’s her available experience.

Tyler Emrick:

You nailed it.

Walter Storholt:

As she’s grabbing for relevant context, that’s what she’s got nearby.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it. That’s really what it’s getting at there.

The next one. We’ll move on from that one and go into something a little bit easier here. Optimism bias and pessimism bias.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

We know optimism and pessimism. These are basically your tendencies to believe either positive or negative outcomes based off yourself.

Me, I like to think I tend to be a little bit more optimistic. I don’t know, Walt, which camp would you fall? Do you tend to lean more optimistic or pessimistic?

Walter Storholt:

You strike me as an optimist.

Tyler Emrick:

Okay.

Walter Storholt:

I’m definitely too far on the optimist scale. I would have to check my own optimism bias likely, in a lot of cases. Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

Yeah.

Walter Storholt:

This stock will always go up!

Tyler Emrick:

I gotcha. But that can come through when we’re making our decisions. If you have a pessimism bias, you might be always looking towards the dark side. It might be just an involuntary view that hey, of your health and longevity, you just never think, “Ah, I’m never going to make it into my 80s, I’m never going to make it into my 90s.” It over emphasizes those personal experiences, family health histories, and so on and so forth. And really skew our judgment, as opposed to being really impartial and looking at the life expectancy data, which we’ll get into a little bit here, and really looking at it through that lens.

The third one that they dove into. We’re two in. The third one is present bias and temporal discounting.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

What this is going to-

Walter Storholt:

If I hadn’t already done the egghead alert, I could have done it again there on temporal discounting.

Tyler Emrick:

There’s a few of them in here.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

I don’t know if there’s any listeners that get into these cognitive biases, there’s a whole host of them. A lot of them have very similar definitions. We had to study it quite a bit in our CFP. Your financial advisors, the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER, they had to get into this quite a bit.

Walter Storholt:

Interesting.

Tyler Emrick:

We’re speaking to it in a way of claiming social security, and how you approach decision making. But frankly, these are going to be applicable, Walt, to any decision that you make. Portfolio analysis, or how you view your accounts, and all that. All these are going to come in and can show up from time to time, and really maybe lead you astray a little bit if we’re not cognizant of them.

Walter Storholt:

That’s a good example too, I think of just being a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER, if I can lift that up a little bit. That’s an area of study and a level of planning that your average advisor’s not going to go through.

Tyler Emrick:

Sure.

Walter Storholt:

That’s a pretty unique thing, I would imagine, to the CFP world?

Tyler Emrick:

It is.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

We like to think of it as almost hey, if you’re working with an advisor that hasn’t … Normally, if you’re taking your profession seriously, almost like a barrier to entry. It’s really a good thing for an advisor to look into and take because not only does it get into to what you would traditionally think of financial planning advice and the topics you would need to go into, but it also gets into some of these more obscure areas. That, when you really think about helping families and helping them make financial decisions, understanding some of these when you’re talking to families will help you present ideas and present options in a way that can help counteract some of these, if we’re working with families that might have one of these biases that we’re talking about.

Walter Storholt:

Understanding behavior is just as important as the numbers, in a lot of these situations.

Tyler Emrick:

It is.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

That’s not to say, Walt, that hey, every decision that you make has to be the financially maximizing decision. But at the end of the day, you want to have everything laid out in a path where you can make the decision that’s best for you. If that’s not the maximizing decision financially, okay, but you have to understand what you’re giving up-

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

To make that more emotional decision.

Walter Storholt:

All right. I didn’t mean to send you on a different track there, but yes.

Tyler Emrick:

Oh no, you’re good.

Walter Storholt:

Back to present bias and temporal discounting.

Tyler Emrick:

Yeah. That gets to the fact that we tend to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to present time than to those in the future. If I could say that maybe another way, the certainly of those smaller payments now can outweigh larger payments later.

When I approach a social security conversation, it’s very common for individuals to say, “Well hey, is social security even going to be there? I’d like to get it while it’s there.” That, “The money in my hand’s worth more than what it could be longer term and what it might grow to down the road.”

Let’s be real. Even when we’re working through a financial plan, it’s hard for myself to think about, “What can this really grow to? What does that mean?” I know what the amount is now, but that amount in your 80s and your 90s, it’s really hard to wrap your arms around and quantify, “Well, what does that really mean and what does that benefit?” We tend to over-weight getting that money in our hand now more than going forward.

I think this is maybe I’m stretching the definition here a little bit as well, but I think it’s a good point to bring up as we’re on a somewhat subject here. Another way to look at it too, is when you take your social security early, you don’t have to dip into your personal assets too, as much.

Let’s say you retire at 62 and you plan to delay to take your social security until your full retirement age of, say 67, well someone’s got to float that bill for those few years. A lot of times, individuals will look at social security payments as maybe not using their own assets per se, and that allows them to keep more money in their accounts and let it grow. It really feels good to do that. It’s partly because hey, when we start looking at those numbers down the road, it’s hard for us to quantify that.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah, that’s a great point.

Tyler Emrick:

Much easier to spend social security than your own assets, right?

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. That’s very logical to approach it that way at first, without further analysis. Very understandable.

I know this is a social security podcast, but I also see that present bias and temporal discounting popping up, correct me if I’m wrong, but in debt payoff. Or considering whether to pay cash for a car, versus take a loan out of it. “I could pay cash for it, but it’d sure be nice to have the cashflow and just pay a little bit each month. I’ll overpay and get rid of it quicker, but I’d rather spend a little bit more on some interest and not spend all that money up front.” Even if it costs me the wiser, longer term finance choice is I’ll pay less if I pay cash for it. I can see that debate happening in people’s minds.

Tyler Emrick:

It can go both ways.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

You use the car example. It’s great, where interest rates are right now. We’re seeing car loans and notes in that seven, eight percent range.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

Not to say that you can’t get buy down.

Walter Storholt:

Not like it was back when it was two.

Tyler Emrick:

Right. Yes. Not to say that you can’t get deals and dealers working with you. I have seen rates in the low threes. But normally, those are deals, and they’re pushing certain cars, and so on and so forth. Yes, it absolutely becomes more of a decision, and where that rate is, and what you can get on your money staying invested, and what are the tax ramifications of that all go into play. But those biases show up there for sure.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

For sure.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

We’re almost through, but there’s a couple more that I want to bring up here. We’re almost there, everybody.

The next one would be what’s called anchoring effect. Anchoring effect is when we rely too heavily on the first piece of information that’s encountered, so we anchor to it when we make large decisions.

What they were getting at here is saying well, when you first find out that you can take social security early, a lot of times you might anchor someone to that age as the appropriate time to apply without fully considering some of those financial benefits of waiting. It becomes really difficult to pull up that anchor and adjust your plans with new information as you start to learn.

Say, hey, the fact is that almost 60% of people, at age 62, will live longer than their break even age. Traditionally, that break even age is in your late 70s. Looking at a stat like that saying, “All right, if I’m more than a flip of a coin that says I might make it past my break even age,” it might be hard to adjust that initial thought, “I am kick it in 62.”

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. I’m an “anchorer”, I think. If I’m looking at my own behavior, I’m totally an “anchorer”. I see this in shopping.

Tyler Emrick:

Really? Okay.

Walter Storholt:

If I find something, especially like a car. We were talking about cars and things like that. I’ll get my heart set on one maybe. Or when we were house shopping, back in the day, I think we would do that a little bit.

But honestly, a great example here I think is, again not social security, but hiring.

Tyler Emrick:

Okay, yeah,

Walter Storholt:

I think this is why the advice is to try to apply pretty quickly when jobs open up because people, like me who are “anchorers” and maybe want to go ahead and get a jumpstart on review applications, will become attached to some of the early applicants compared to someone who comes in at the end of the process.

Tyler Emrick:

Right.

Walter Storholt:

I don’t know. I’ve seen my own behavior in that way. To the point where, last time I went through and hired somebody, I forced myself to not look at the applications.

Tyler Emrick:

Okay.

Walter Storholt:

Until all the applications were in, as a way to just experiment, to see if it changed my way of looking at the applicants, and not looking at them in the order of submission necessarily. Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

That’s awesome that you put yourself in a situation to say, “Hey, I think I do this. How can I set up ways to break that habit?”

Walter Storholt:

Yeah.

Tyler Emrick:

To have a little less bias.

Walter Storholt:

I’m not saying it was better doing it that way, but I tried it.

Tyler Emrick:

But you tried it. Yes, absolutely. Well, we run across that all the time in financial planning. As a financial advisor, a lot of what we do is to present things in a different way, in a different light, that maybe you weren’t thinking of before.

We have a number of families that we work with, and the scenarios and the situations that we see are wide. That experience and that value over time that we’ve been in the industry … All of our advisors have been in the industry for a number of years now. That experience and leaning on that is helpful. We can look back onto how it’s worked in the past and help people think of these decisions in a little bit different light.

Absolutely, I think that’s exactly what we’re getting at here. Hey, if we took that one comment away from the podcast today, that’s successful.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. We’re getting into some deep thinking here on the show. I like it.

Tyler Emrick:

The last one we’ll touch on that Dave brought up, which is called status quo bias. It’s just, simply put, there’s a preference to a current state of affairs. If we change from that baseline, it could be perceived as a loss.

If we were originally, again, coming in, focusing on that 62 as the ideal retirement age. “Hey, when I retire, I want to kick in social security.” There’s that slight resistance to altering that retirement plans. Even if you learn that hey, delaying is going to be great, it’s in your financial best interest, it can still be hard to make that financial adjustment.

We’ve gone down a handful of them now. I think that’s the list that they had in the article, all of which I think were helpful, and I think are good things to be thinking of. Another thing, I guess, that I’ll bring up here before we touch on some of the quirks that I want to touch on with social security would be that a lot of times, when we start talking about life expectancy, it’s not lost on us as financial advisors that that can be a difficult conversation, just in general, to start thinking about death. And discussing that coming up and when that might happen, we see that all the time in estate planning, too. But when we start thinking about social security decision and the benefits of waiting, you might have to see some time to wait, you have to come to that realization.

I would argue that there’s a greater risk of failing to think about living into your 80s and 90s than there are with the opposite to think about it. Many people who opt to take social security early, they’re trying to get the most return possible from their lifetime of work. They’re like, “Hey, give me that money now.” And the taxes they paid in, because let’s be honest, you paid in for this benefit. You want to be able to get it. Yet, a lot of times, given the numbers and given the difference between your assumptions and the statistics about life expectancy, that early filing can result in really just the opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish if you’re not careful, depending on your situation.

Which I think, to these final two points of the pod here today that I want to touch on, is maybe that hey, starting to think about social security a little bit differently and some things that I thought have been helpful for some of my families that we’ve worked with over the years.

The first one that I want to touch on is understanding the basics of how social security works is extremely, extremely important. Yes, we all get the fact that you can start it at 62. You can wait all the way up until age 70. You’re going to get incremental increases between there. If you haven’t heard it, you will, this idea of delayed retirement credits, which are essentially the increases in social security from your full retirement age until age 70. I think everyone has probably heard and understands that you got to get about an 8% increase in my benefits from each year, from 67 to age 70.

I don’t think a lot of individuals realize that the reason that’s in there is because social security wanted it to be actuarily … I definitely maybe mispronounced that, Walt. But actuarily equivalent, regardless of whether you think your benefits earlier or later. This idea of actuarily equivalent really comes back to life expectancy. We see it quite a bit with life insurance companies.

What happens is when life insurance companies price out life insurance or annuities, or social security was trying to figure out how much that increase would be, what they did is they looked at life expectancy tables or mortality tables of how long do we think individuals will live. This is done by professional actuaries, super smart people. A lot of times, they’re the smartest people in the room. Really, really good at math. But what they’re doing is they’re calculating the risk of death for a male and a female at all ages, and they publish their results. Social security, you can look up their life expectancy tables right on their website, which will say, “Hey, if you’re this age, this is your life expectancy.” On social security’s website, at age 62, I think their life expectancy is 19 years, so just around early 80s there would be the life expectancy if that’s your age.

Well, when life insurance companies go in and use these actuarial tables and try to calculate this, they’re using the tables, but then they’re also utilizing your personalized health experience and making you fill out evaluations, so that way they can really try to zero in on what’s the likelihood of you living to a particular age, so that way they can set prices.

When social security did all this, their life expectancies were much shorter at the time when this law was passed. When you get down into these actuarial tables and how that applies to the benefit, well our life expectancy now is much longer. I think it’s expected to continue to increase, Walt. The last data that I heard that an individual, at birth, has an average life expectancy of just under 80 years. They’re expecting that to increase. The Congressional Budget Office puts out data on this all the time. They’re expecting it to actually increase to your early 80s by the year 2053. There’s a lot of data that suggests we’re going to continue to live longer, and longer, and longer.

If benefits are skewed for social security saying, “Hey, we didn’t think you would live this long when we calculated those benefits,” well then that just amplifies that benefit for you to continue to wait on potentially taking those benefits. That’s the one point that I wanted to bring up.

The final one that we’ll bring into is maybe the way that you view your social security and trying to make sure that you’re looking at it through the lens of your overall financial plan. I think I say that probably on every podcast, right, Walt? You go to look at your decision through the lens of your financial plan. What does your financial plan say? But social security is quite unique from a lot of your other assets. If you look at your personal balance sheet, for example. Because social security is actually impacted by inflation and interest rates a little bit differently. When inflation rises, your social security benefit is actually worth more. When interest rates are low, your social security is actually worth more. You might be thinking what do I mean by that?

Well, if we look at inflation and why it’s worth more there, well social security is indexed to inflation, meaning that you’re going to get a cost of living adjustment each year. You look at all your other investible assets, Walt, a lot of them are going to be negatively impacted by inflation because your money’s worth less because the cost of living is more. That’s looking at it from an inflation standpoint.

As we look at it from at higher interest rates, then social security is worth more if we’re in a lower interest rate environment. Because that stream of payments from social security, it would take a lot more money for you to replicate that because you’re earning less interest on that money. That makes that social security payment that much more beneficial.

When we look at it through that lens, again, inflation and interest rates, it adds diversification to your overall balance sheet and your personal financial statement, and really acts and gives you a unique stream of income. Boy, that cost of living adjustment, when we look back onto that, too. There’s not much paying that anymore, Walt. Even if you look back on the old pension plans that used to be so prevalent, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those, very, very few of them actually have a cost of living adjustment. Certainly, some of the state employees and Federal employees are still getting some cost of living adjustments. But if you’re getting something from your employer that you worked 30 years at, or 40 years at, and they’re paying and giving you a cost of living adjustment on it, then that’s a huge benefit that you’re just not seeing much anymore.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. It’s nice to see those options and benefits for people. Really interesting to just reframe all of this social security conversation, not only through these behavioral elements. But like you’re saying, don’t just understand the basics of social security. Yes, that’s important. But dig, just like you always do here on the show, Tyler, just dig that one layer deeper and it really reveals a lot more.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it, you got it.

Walter Storholt:

Awesome.

Tyler Emrick:

Hopefully some of the listeners found some benefit in just a little bit different approaching, being mindful of some of these mental shortcuts that we brought up today. Certainly, I think it applies to social security, as we talked about, but really in any decision that you’re making from a financial standpoint. Just trying to make sure you’re looking at it and approaching it with these biases and mental shortcuts in mind. Well, it’ll hopefully get you to a better point and put you in a better position to be successful going forward.

Walter Storholt:

Well, here’s the story. If you want some help and some guidance, not only addressing social security, that’s just one big part of the financial planning process. But if you want to look at a complete review of your portfolio and your plan, I’ve got a great place for you to start that’s not all that intimidating and pretty easy to set up. You can schedule a 15-minute call with an experienced advisor on the True Wealth team by going to truewealthdesign.com and just click the Are We Right For You button. That’ll let you schedule that introductory call with the team, see if you’re a good fit to work with one another, where Tyler, and Kevin, and the rest of the team might be able to move the needle when it comes to your financial planning and your retirement goals. Truewealthdesign.com, click Are We Right For You. We’ve got a link to that in the description of today’s show as well. Along with the phone number, which is 855-TWD-PLAN. That’s 855-893-7526. Reach out, if it’s convenient for you, and set up that time to chat.

Hey, Tyler, thank you so much for the guidance on the episode today. Enjoyed looking at things through a new lens. I think you need a t-shirt that says that, your tagline now.

Tyler Emrick:

Hey, we’ll do it.

Walter Storholt:

“We need to look at the retirement through a new lens.” We have a little monocle on there, or something like that. It’d be great.

Tyler Emrick:

I like it.

Walter Storholt:

I love it.

Tyler Emrick:

That was a pleasure. I had fun.

Walter Storholt:

Hey, have a great rest of your week. No more flying in your neat future, right? No more delays?

Tyler Emrick:

Not for a while.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

Not for a while, at least.

Walter Storholt:

All right. All right. We made it through without the lightning strike.

Tyler Emrick:

We did, we did.

Walter Storholt:

We didn’t lose power. That’s good stuff. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us, everybody. Have a great rest of your week. We’ll see you next time, right back here, on Retire Smarter.

Speaker 4:

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