You probably already know that delaying your Social Security will increase the amount of your benefit check. But, waiting to start collecting isn’t always best or your only consideration. In this first lesson’s six-minute video you will learn the top five things to consider in order to get all you have coming from Social Security.

The very first thing to understand when it comes to maximizing your benefits is the importance of what is referred to as your full retirement age.

More often than not this age will play a key role in just about every strategy for maximizing benefits as well as the potential traps that can reduce benefits. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that your full retirement age is always the best time to start your benefits. It might be, but in many situations a person could gain an advantage by starting benefits later or even earlier then their full retirement age.

In this lesson’s six-minute video you will see how the benefit start age can have a different impact on those who are single, married, divorced, or widowed.

Shocking, but true… After decades of paying “taxes” to support Social Security, up to 85% of benefits are taxable at retirement. Fortunately there are legal ways to slash these taxes. The key is that you must plan in advance. And before you can plan, you have to watch this lesson’s seven-minute video.

If you are married, Social Security is even more complex. The reason is that married couples have at least five benefits that they must optimize. And each benefit can have a different set of complex rules.

For example, many believe that the Social Security spousal benefit is always 50% of their partners retirement benefit.  And a good number of these people are shocked to find that they actually received only 35% of what they could have gotten had they understood the rules.

Watching this lesson’s ten-minute video is critically important for married couples who want to maximize all of the benefits they are eligible to receive.

Divorce often has a negative financial impact on both ex-spouses. In some situations a divorce might force a person to start his or her retirement benefit as early as possible which can greatly limit options and opportunities to maximize benefits. But, divorce can also result in the ability to use strategies that aren’t available for married couples. In some ways divorced spouses have even greater rights to Social Security benefits than do spouse who are currently married.

Watching this lesson’s four-minute video could be especially important if you are divorced or know someone who is.

Maximizing survivor benefits can be extremely important for the future security of any spouse. With the right claiming strategy widows and widowers can get 100 percent of their deceased spouse’s benefit. But a wrong decision made by one spouse regarding the start date of his or her own retirement benefit can greatly reduce the other spouse’s survivor benefit. Unfortunately, too many surviving spouses only discover this mistake long after it is too late to do anything about it.

This lesson’s 5-minute video will show you the relationship between this benefits and how to add future financial security for any surviving spouse.

Many people would like to keep working after start Social Security but don’t because they have heard this would result in the permanently loss of benefits. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If continued employment (while collecting benefits) is a possibility for you then you will want to watch this lesson’s four-minute video. In it you will learn about something Social Security calls “the adjustment of the reduction factor” or ARF. This is the key to getting back every penny of any reductions in your benefits that were due working while collecting Social Security.

WEP stands for Windfall Elimination Provision. GPO is short for Government Pension Offset. They each represent a set of rules that are designed to potentially reduce or even eliminate Social Security benefits when a person or spouse has a pension from work that was not covered by Social Security.

It will be import to watch this lesson’s seven-minute video for anyone impacted by WEP or GPO.

This course will wrap up with a four-minute video that will show you an easy way to get your benefit statement from the Social Security website.