What If?? Social Security Edition

Chris closes 2024 with a thought-provoking exercise: What if you could manage your Social Security contributions? By comparing your lifetime Social Security payments with potential investment returns, Markowski highlights the stark difference between government-managed returns and private investment growth. Are you losing out? Play along with a compounding calculator and see how much more your money could have grown. www.watchdogonwallstreet.com

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
On the last day of twenty twenty four, We're going
to play a little version of what if? What if?
Monday Morning quarterback type of stuff. Actually, I've got a
couple of books. You know, what if this happened in
history rather than this. It was that popular television series
there on Amazon. I never watched. It was a Man

(00:36):
in the High Castle and it's basically an entire series
based on the fa in Germany and Japan one World one,
World War two, What would happen? Well, we're going to
do a what if version. What if version not as
scary as The Man in the High Castle, but pretty

(00:56):
scary in itself. We're going to do what if so
social security version. Now, I want everybody to play I
want I like everybody to play along. Okay, I'm going
to tell you what to do, tell you what to do.
I want you to go back. I want you to
go back, depends how old you are. Okay, younger listeners.
You may want to go back ten years, how long

(01:17):
you've been working, you know, a serious job, twenty years,
thirty years. I played it for thirty years. I went
back thirty years, and I low bald, I lowbald, I
low bald. I basically calculated how much money every year
I contributed to Social Security. The figure out you know

(01:40):
how much you put in over the course. Here you
can actually go and take a look. Quite frankly, go
take a look look at your Social Security county. It'll
give you the gist of that. And I also want
you not just the money that you contributed, because that's
part of the trick. Oh, there is the employee percentage,
and then there's the employer percentage. The employee your percentage

(02:01):
is your percentage. Okay, if your employer wasn't sending it
to Social Security, they'd be sending it to you. It's
how it works, and I want you to get it.
Take out a compounding calculator, and I want you to
go back and it's just average it out, average out
how much you paid in, Like I said, depending on
how old you are. I did it for thirty years.

(02:23):
How much you put in every single year, and I
want you to take a percentage amount. Now I know
how much my personal portfolio has grown grown on average
over the past thirty some odd years. I lowballed it.
I went below by multiple percentage points, saying that, hey,

(02:46):
you know what, what if you know what if I
had to put this money in and it had to
get a good rate of return, but not not you know,
an actively managed return, and see what you come up with.
Play with the compounding calculator. See what you come up
with again, not as scary as the Nazis in Japan

(03:11):
winning World War Two, but scary and if itself, you're
going to see how how much money you would have had,
how much money you would have had, and then you
know what you ought to be more, you know, ticked
off or aggravated, extrapolated into the future based upon when
you are, you know, looking where you might decide you

(03:33):
might decide to start collecting social security at that point
in time and compare it again. You can do this
by going you have an account, Okay, it's not really
an account, but it's an account, and see how much
money you're going to receive supposed to receive, have they
have allocated for you? When you decide to start collecting it.

(03:55):
Whether it be sixty five, sixty seven, whatever it may be,
it's pretty bad. It's it's pretty darn bad. I'd just
put it this way, if I showed those levels of
returns half one quarter uh to my clients, I'd be
quite franctly be out of business again. Little game of

(04:18):
what if? What if? You're going to see how much
you are getting skewed by Social Security Watchdog on Wall
street dot com