About
Get What’s Yours – the books, this web site, my Substack newsletter, and links to 15 years of my online work – is about helping people make informed decisions as they age.
Becoming informed, and knowing what to do about it, have become increasingly challenging tasks in a technologically driven society becoming ever more complex. An epidemic of misinformation is obscuring the truth, eroding our trust in each other, and sowing confusion about who and what to believe.
I believe the truth, not weaponized but fairly presented, is essential to maintaining democratic freedoms. I once assumed that truth would always win out in the good ol’ US of A. I now think we must step up and fight to protect our rights to know and speak the truth.
I depend on you to help me do so. I want and need your feedback and suggestions about topics of interest to you. I must know if I’ve made mistakes. I especially need to know if my understanding of the truth differs from yours, and why.
Here is my email: moeller.philip@gmail.com.
Thank you.
–Philip Moeller
About the Authors
Philip Moeller
Philip Moeller is an award-winning financial journalist, author and entrepreneur. He co-authored the first “Get What’s Yours” book on Social Security with Larry Kotlikoff and Paul Solman; he is the sole author of the second and third GWY volumes on Medicare and Health Care.
Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security, was on The New York Times bestseller list for six months after its release in 2015. One of the little-used claiming strategies highlighted in the book – the so-called “file and suspend” strategy – was so popular with readers that Congress decided to eliminate it in late 2015. A revised edition of the book was published in 2016 and, four years later, remains the most accurate and comprehensive guide to the program.
Get What’s Yours for Medicare: Maximize Your Coverage, Minimize Your Costs, was published in 2016. It became a bestseller in its field and remains accurate more than four years later.
Annual updates to both programs may be found among the GWY blog posts.
Phil began his career as a newspaper reporter and has been a financial writer and editor at The Charlotte Observer, the Chicago Sun-Times, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, The (Baltimore) Sun, and the Hartford Business Journal. His major business journalism awards include the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He is a former president of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, and was in the inaugural class of Bagehot Fellows in Business and Economics Journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
After leaving daily newspapers, Phil founded Insure.com, an Internet pioneer that became the leading online provider of consumer insurance information. He sold that business and later was a corporate communications executive at Genworth Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services firm. He returned to journalism, first at U.S. News & World Report and later at Money magazine and the PBS NewsHour.
Phil graduated from Princeton University and has a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where he also taught. He lives in central Virginia.
Phil can be reached at @PhilMoeller
Laurence J. Kotlikoff
Laurence J. Kotlikoff is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a professor of economics at Boston University. He is also president of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company specializing in financial planning software. His company websites are ESPlanner.com and MaximizeMySocialSecurity.com. He is author or co-author of sixteen books, including Spend ‘Til the End and The Coming Generational Storm (both with Scott Burns). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, The Economist, Huffington Post, and other major publications. He has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, governments around the world, and major U.S. corporations including Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, and AON. In addition, he has provided expert testimony on numerous occasions to committees of Congress. He lives in New England.
Larry can be reached at @kotlikoff
Paul Solman
Paul Solman is an American journalist focused on economics, business, and politics since the early 1970s. He has been the business and economics correspondent for the PBS NewsHour since 1985, with occasional forays into art reporting.
His work has been recognized with eight Emmys, five Peabodys, a Loeb award and a James Beard award (though not for cooking).
Solman began his career in business journalism as a Nieman Fellow, studying at the Harvard Business School. A 1966 graduate of Brandeis University, where he edited the weekly newspaper, he was the founding editor of the alternative Boston weekly The Real Paper in 1972. He was the East Coast Editor of Mother Jones magazine in the late 1970s.
He co-authored, with longtime PBS executive and writer Thomas Friedman, Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield in 1983. He joined The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (now The PBS NewsHour) in 1985. Solman taught at the Harvard Business School from 1985 to 1987.
In 1994, with his professor at Brandeis, sociologist Morrie Schwartz, he helped create—and wrote the introduction to—the book Morrie: In His Own Words, which preceded Tuesdays with Morrie but failed to outsell it by several orders of magnitude.
From 2007 to 2016, he was a faculty member at Yale University’s International Security Studies program, teaching in its “Grand Strategy” course. He also lectured for years at the Yale Young Global Scholars [6] program, the Warrior-Scholar program at Yale, has taught at West Point, among many universities, and was the Richman Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brandeis in 2011. He has also taught economics at Gateway Community College in New Haven, Connecticut, where he founded the Yale@Gateway speaker series.
Solman co-produced, with Bob Burns, and presented a series of companion videos to McGraw-Hill economics textbooks.
His 2015 book Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security, a collaboration with economist Laurence Kotlikoff and author Philip Moeller, was a bona fide bestseller; the book was reissued in May 2016 due to changes in Social Security regulations.
Solman was a visiting fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford University in 2016.
With his former Yale student David McCullough and longtime Harvard professor Robert Glauber, Solman created the American Exchange Project in 2018, a nonpolitical nonprofit domestic “foreign exchange” program that introduces high school seniors from everywhere in America to each other and sends and embeds them, for free, in communities utterly unlike their own. Solman is president of the board and an active recruiter of communities and support.
Solman is married to Jan Freeman, a former language columnist for The Boston Globe. He has two grown daughters and seven grandchildren. His father Joseph Solman was a painter and co-founder of The Ten art movement.
Paul can be reached at @paulsolman
