Why subscribe?

Get What’s Yours – the books, the blog posts, the web site – is dedicated to providing fact-based information to help people make smart decisions. My three GWY books are about Social Security, Medicare, and health care. I also am on the lookout for helpful information about aging. The common denominator of a GWY topic is that it’s complicated, affects lots of people, and involves decisions where a lot is on the line – money, well-being, and even survival.

Paid subscribers will receive password access to the Ask Phil FAQ archive at getwhatsyours.org, which contains a regularly updated archive of more than 135 articles about Medicare, Social Security, and other topics of importance to grown-ups.

All subscribers will receive access to the rest of getwhatsyours.org, including information about my books and links to thousands of pieces I’ve written during the past 15 years.

I have spent the past seven years taking a very detailed look at Social Security, Medicare, and health care. All merit big changes to better serve us. I write about the many informed people and groups with solid ideas to change them. There are, however, only a handful of misguided souls dedicated to explaining how the programs work. I am one of that unfortunate number.

Study after study has documented that people make poor decisions about using Social Security, Medicare, and health care. These decisions cost billions and billions of dollars. They worsen the retirement and health outlooks of millions of Americans. The reason is not only that the programs need reform. It’s that people don’t understand the current rules. Nearly no one tries to rectify this, leading to my many laughable Don Quixote impersonations as I look for the next windmill to face my wrath.

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, remains an 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 is still timely.

Get What's Yours for Health Care: How to Get the Best Care at the Right Price was published in 2021 and is a useful guide to navigating the messed-up health care system.

Important updates to topics in my books may be found here and, especially, on getwhatsyours.org.

My career as newspaper reporter, business editor and later columnist has taken me to The Charlotte Observer, the Chicago Sun-Times, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, The (Baltimore) Sun, and the Hartford Business Journal. I won some journalism awards along the way, am 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, I founded Insure.com, an Internet pioneer that became the leading online provider of consumer insurance information. I sold that business in the early 2000s and later was a corporate communications executive at Genworth Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services firm. In 2008, I returned to journalism, first at U.S. News & World Report and later at Money magazine and the PBS NewsHour.

I graduated from Princeton University and have a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where I also taught. I now reside in central Virginia.

I can be reached at @PhilMoeller

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