Robert Brokamp

speaker

4,411 appearances 40 recordings 3 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 19 Sep

Robert Brokamp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 40 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.

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Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing · How Your Social Security Benefit Is Actually Calculated · 15 Aug 2026 podcast

It also assumes that you'll earn that income every year up until the year you claim benefits.

But that may not be the case, perhaps because retired at one age but delayed claiming to an older age.

The projections in your statement will also not be accurate if your income changes materially between now and when you claim benefits, which will be the case for Fred, the fool who posed the question at the beginning of this episode and expects to go eventually part-time and reduce his income by 50%.

In these cases, you may get a more refined estimate from the Social Security Detail Calculator, which can be found at, and this is the long URL here.

SSA.gov forward slash OACT forward slash N E P I A forward slash N E P I A dot HTML.

And if you didn't get all that, just do an online search for the Social Security Details calculator.

And just know that if you want to use it, you have to download it onto your computer.

Another excellent free resource that may be helpful is SSA.tools, created by a member of the esteemed Bogleheads community.

And a final resource to consider is maximize my socialsecurity.com, which costs $49 a year but allows you to enter past earnings, which actually can be imported.

And then you can manually enter future earnings assumptions and come up with a benefit estimate.

And the software will also recommend a claiming age for you.

Finally, I should address the elephant in the room, which is that the Social Security Trust Fund is expected to run dry sometime around 2032 or so, at which point the program will only be able to pay around 75% to 80% of benefits.

Now, I hope that our government comes up with a solution before then.

And you know, it's an election year, so feel free to find out what the various candidates are proposing.

I do think that any potential changes may change some of the nuts and bolts of how Social Security benefits are calculated, but I also think that the essential machinery that I have described in this episode will mostly remain the same.

So Fred, I hope that helps you zero in on an answer to your question.

And if you, dear listener, have a question or feedback on these Saturday episodes, send them to podcast at fool.com.

I can't promise we'll be able to answer each question, but we'll do our best, perhaps along the way or in our mailbag episode in September.

And that my foolest friends is the show.

Thanks so much for listening and thanks to Bart Shannon, the engineer, for this and every Saturday episode.

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