--- title: Will Social Security Be There for Me? | TIME description: The future of social security means you need to start saving for retirement now. canonical: https://time.com/video/D7u6xtpa/ og:title: Will Social Security Be There for Me? og:description: The future of social security means you need to start saving for retirement now. og:url: https://time.com/video/D7u6xtpa/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/D7u6xtpa/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Will Social Security Be There for Me? twitter:description: The future of social security means you need to start saving for retirement now. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/D7u6xtpa/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Will Social Security Be There for Me? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Will Social Security Be There for Me? [Watch (HLS stream): Will Social Security Be There for Me?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/D7u6xtpa.m3u8) (2:52)  _Published 2016-05-16. The future of social security means you need to start saving for retirement now._ --- Jul 27, 2023 8:06 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Is Social Security Going Broke? ](/video/t4gxLcls/) ### Is Social Security Going Broke? [Social Security and Disability](/video/WKZHj8hL/) ### Social Security and Disability [Mannes on the Street: Will Social Security Be There For You?](/video/LUoXFRhE/) ### Mannes on the Street: Will Social Security Be There For You? --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] One of the questions we get asked all the time is whether Social Security will be there for you, for our children, for our grandchildren and Larry and I have some differing views, but it's gonna depend, to some extent, on how old you are. Right. I think the political process is such that's it's gonna be very hard to To dramatically cut the benefits of people that are already collecting or very close to collecting . >> Social Security now only has enough money to pay full benefits for about 20, 22 years, depending on how you are counting. Then the benefits will be cut to about 80 cents on the dollar. So there is a short term need to figure out what we're going to do to shore up that fund so that we're going to continue to pay 100 percent of those benefits 20, 30, 40 years from now, but that's only part of the problem. According to the prestige report that was released in July in two thousand And is 26 trillion in the red and that means that we have a massive problem for our younger people. They're either going to get absolutely nothing or get very little unless older generations kick in and take less or pay more in the form of taxes. In the short term, there are some ways. To fix the imbalance in Social Security. One of them, for example, is to raise what's called the wage base, which is the maximum amount of money on which you pay payroll taxes every year. It's now around $ 120, 000, but in order for that wage base to represent a real healthy contribution It would have to be almost doubled. Yeah. Unfortunately Phil, the system is so broke that even taxing all of wages with no ceiling whatsoever would only cover about 40 % of the problem. So, a lot of the proposed solutions like increasing retirement age gradually or even raising the ceiling. A little bit or, somewhat there all too little to late. If you do too little too late, you will leave a bigger problem for your kids. And it's not morally appropriate to be passing the buck. Whether Larry and I agree or not, you face the decision about what you should do about social security, And the younger you are, the more you have to think about this. The odds are clear that you're gonna get less from this program in the future than older people get today and you need to take care of yourself. So the answers are we think you should consider working longer and you absolutely have to kick up your personal savings rate. Because you can't expect anybody to do it for you. I am Phil Moeller. I am Larry Kotlikoff. And we are here to get the most out of your social security. [ MUSIC ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Will Social Security Be There for Me?","description":"The future of social security means you need to start saving for retirement now.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/D7u6xtpa/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-05-16T21:32:54.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/D7u6xtpa.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/D7u6xtpa/","duration":"PT2M52S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/D7u6xtpa/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```