Financial Strategy #2: Social Security

The book Your Stronger Financial Future: The Eight Essential Strategies for Making Profitable Investments lists eight misconceptions, truths, and strategies to help readers deal with a variety of major financial issues. I'll be highlighting these in several posts and giving you my thoughts on them. Today we'll look at strategy #2 which deals with Social Security. The book says the following on this subject: The misconception: Social Security is on the brink of collapse. The truth: Social Security is as secure as the dollar -- even more so. The strategy: Develop an overall financial plan with Social Security as just one part. Personally, I don't think Social Security is on the brink of collapse -- at least the type of collapse where it simply "goes under" and takes the economy with it. But I do think that changes are inevitable. Something has to give -- either older ages before benefits kick in, reduced benefits, some combination of the two, or something else -- but it's clear to me that there's no way Social Security will stay unchanged forever (and probably not even for the next decade.) That said, I'm still not counting on Social Security as part of my retirement plans. No one knows how much they'll cut/change it, so I'm saving for retirement as if I'll get nothing. That way, I'll be fine if they cut benefits to the bare bones and be pleasantly surprised if they don't and I get a good amount back. Either way, I have a secure retirement. By the way, sometime in January I'll give you an update on how my retirement plan is going. Much of it depends on how the stock market performs and as we all know, that's been a rollercoaster this year. At least it keeps things "interesting", huh? ;-)