What Age Should You Start Social Security?
Updated: Sep 10
Watch as Will Allen and Jonathan Brummel sit down to talk through some of the most discussed topics in finance right now.
First up: Social Security. What age should you actually start? We cover what a breakeven age really tells you (and what it leaves out), how spousal benefits work, and what to make of the trust fund projected to run out in 2032.
Then savings accounts for kids and grandkids. We compare the new Trump Accounts, UTMAs, and 529s, including what each one does well, and where each one falls short.
Plus recent client questions: why data centers have become such a hot button topic, whether all the focus on AI means there are good investments flying under the radar, and most importantly, what's a good family recipe?
Video Recap
The conversation in written form, for readers who prefer it that way
The Breakeven Question
Most of the industry answers this with breakeven math. If your benefit is $2,000 a month at 62 and $2,500 at 67, how many years of the larger check does it take to make up for five years of the smaller one?
It is also a narrower question than it looks, because it assumes the only thing that matters is the total collected by one person. Your health matters. Longevity in your family matters. What your cash flow looks like between now and then matters, and so does your tax picture. If you are married, the biggest factor usually is not on the breakeven chart at all.
When One Check Goes Away
When one spouse dies, the household keeps the larger of the two Social Security checks and the smaller one stops permanently. That is worth sitting with, because most couples plan as though both keep arriving.
Men tend to die earlier than women, and in a lot of marriages the husband is also the older spouse. We see seven-year age gaps regularly. Put a seven-year age difference on top of a six-year longevity difference and you have a wife who may live thirteen years past her husband, on his benefit alone, for all of them.
That changes the sequencing. Take a couple who both qualify for $2,500 at full retirement age, growing to roughly $3,000 each if they wait until 70. They both wait. They both maximize. Then one of them dies at 74. The household spent eight years deferring two checks and now keeps one.
So we generally start the smaller benefit earlier, within reason and subject to the tax picture, and let the larger one keep growing. The larger check is the one the survivor lives on, which makes it the one worth maximizing.
Family history belongs in this too. Jonathan once met with someone whose entire family had died in their early sixties. That person claimed at 62, and it was the right call.
The Analysis That Moved a Retirement Date by Eight Years
A couple came in planning for him to work until 73. He asked us to run the numbers at 73 and at 70.
We built a full retirement projection, layered the Social Security claiming analysis on top of it, and worked through the rest of the variables. He is retiring this coming March, as soon as he turns 65. Technically he could have stopped this fall.
That is roughly eight years of working life back, and it came out of an analysis rather than out of a better market. If you have never had this done, it is the highest-value hour you can spend on a retirement plan.
Planning Around 2032
The trust fund is projected to run out in 2032, and under current law with no fix, benefits would face a roughly 22% across-the-board reduction at that point. That has made some people hesitant to delay to 70, and there are well-known voices telling everyone to claim at 62 and take what they can while they can.
We have not moved to that position. Congress waits until the house is on fire, and we do not see them letting a 22% cut land on every household in the country.
The more likely version is quieter. The government has ways of reducing what you keep without reducing what you are paid. The One Big Beautiful Bill created real tax relief for people over a certain age. Those provisions can sunset on schedule, nobody reinstates them, and Social Security's finances improve without a single headline about a benefit cut. Your check is unchanged and your net is smaller.
None of this argues for claiming early out of fear. It argues for a plan that still works if your benefit turns out to be worth somewhat less than the statement says, which mostly means making sure the rest of the portfolio can carry more of the load than you first planned for.
Accounts for Kids and Grandkids
Three accounts come up constantly, and the useful answer is usually not just one of them.
Trump accounts are open to any child under 18 with a Social Security number, take up to $5,000 a year from all contributors combined, lock the money until 18, and invest in broad US index funds. Children born 2025 through 2028 also receive a one-time $1,000 from the government. We wrote these up in detail back in March, including the mechanics and the state-tax wrinkles. Left alone at an 8% return, that $1,000 by itself can approach $100,000 over about fifty years, because the account converts to an IRA. If you are a grandparent, that is a better gift than the forty-fifth toy.
529s give you tax-free growth for education and they are genuinely useful, with two frustrations. You get two investment changes a year, so a 30% selloff can show up in a year when you have already used both. And you pick one state's plan, which locks you into that fund family. The bigger problem is not mechanical though. We have both watched parents make funding a 529 the top priority ahead of their own retirement. That does not end with a debt-free kid. It ends with a kid supporting a parent.
UTMAs have no tax advantage, and they are the ones we like most. A UTMA is the only one of the three that can hold individual stocks, which is the entire point. Will started buying stocks in his sons' UTMAs when they were seven and eight and let them pick companies they recognized. Apple, Nike, Disney. Two of those have been poor investments in the years since, which is a lesson of its own. The account taught them what a stock actually is in a way an index fund never would have.
Use more than one. It is the same principle as retirement: different accounts do different jobs, and the mix is what makes it work.
Client Questions
Why data centers became such a hot button. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta need compute, and the race to build it has turned into a gold rush. Some of the pushback is about the grid and the environment. Some of it is about something else. We spent two years hearing that AI would destroy jobs, with Elon Musk floating 20% unemployment by 2030, and a lot of people heard enough of that to start asking why they should help it along. Opposing a data center is one way to push back. Texas and New York, about as far apart politically as two states get, have both slowed down to ask questions, which seems reasonable given how many are already running.
What is being overlooked while everyone watches AI. A month or two ago the software names were beaten down because the market had decided they would be the AI losers. Shopify, Microsoft earlier in the year, CrowdStrike in client portfolios. The market got that wrong and a lot of them have run hard since. Mark Cuban's version of this is worth borrowing: he got his start selling computers door to door in the eighties to business owners who told him they would never need one, and he thinks the same opening exists now for helping ordinary businesses actually use AI.
It is a marathon. Most of the internet era's biggest winners were not public companies in 1999. Google, Meta, and Netflix did not exist on the public market. Amazon did, as an online bookstore, and the stock fell 95% between 2000 and 2002. These things take a decade to resolve, and almost nobody sees the shape of it at the time.
And a family recipe. Someone asked for one, Will admitted he has never made a dinner from a recipe in his life, and it landed with Jonathan. Sheboygan beer brats. Grill the brats first. Grill onions and bell peppers alongside them. Then everything goes into a crock pot with cheap beer and simmers a couple of hours. Grill first, pot second, in that order, and French fries on the side.
Have questions about how this affects your portfolio?
Claiming decisions and account choices for a family tend to look simple until you put them next to everything else in a plan, and that is where the useful work is. That is the kind of analysis we bring to every Sentara Capital client relationship, and if you'd like to talk through what these numbers mean for your specific situation, we'd welcome the conversation.
Contact Us at (770) 509-5305 to Begin Your Journey
FAQ: Social Security Claiming and Accounts for Children
At what age can a surviving spouse claim survivor benefits?
A widow or widower can generally begin survivor benefits at 60, or at 50 if disabled, though claiming before full retirement age permanently reduces the amount. A survivor caring for the deceased's child under 16 can claim at any age. These rules run separately from the survivor's own retirement benefit, which can be switched to later if it ends up larger.
How much can you put into a Trump account each year?
$5,000 per year per child, counted across every contributor combined rather than per person, so parents and all four grandparents share one limit. The government's one-time $1,000 for children born 2025 through 2028 does not count against it. Contributions are after-tax, and the money cannot be withdrawn for any reason before 18.
Why can't you trade freely inside a 529 plan?
Federal rules limit 529 investment changes to two per calendar year per beneficiary. You can get around it once by changing the beneficiary, but otherwise the limit is firm. Plans are also state-sponsored, so the menu is whatever fund family that state contracted with, which is why the plan you pick matters more than most people expect.
Are UTMA accounts counted against a child's financial aid?
Yes, and heavily. A UTMA is the child's asset, and FAFSA assesses student assets at 20% against roughly 5.64% for parent-owned assets like a 529. For a family expecting to file for aid, that difference is the strongest argument for keeping the UTMA modest and running the education money through a 529.
Would a 2032 shortfall reduce everyone's benefit by the same amount?
Under current law with no legislative change, the reduction would be across the board at roughly 22%. Most proposals on the table are not across the board, though: raising the taxable earnings cap, raising the full retirement age, and means-testing higher-income retirees all fall unevenly. Anyone with substantial retirement income should assume they are more exposed than the headline number suggests.
Another question? Call (770) 509-5305.
Click for Full Transcript
Will: Hello, this is Will Allen here with Jonathan Brummel, and we are having our second extended conversation. In our first, we talked about the number one asked question in all of retirement: what is my magic number? Today we are going to be talking about the number two asked question. Before we do that, Jon, hello. How is it going?
Jonathan: It's good. We're back at school and we're back into a routine, which has been nice actually. How did summer go for you guys?
Jonathan: Summer went good. It's about as crazy as you can expect. We had football practice because my oldest two started football. We had company, we had pool, we had woods. It was a lot of fun. But it's good to be back into rhythm, which is great. I never would have thought I would say that, but this year I'm like, okay, let's get back to school, let's get back into rhythm.
Will: Absolutely, man. Well, you had a lot going on. In addition to your 11 children, you had other families coming with kids staying at your house. So there wasn't a dull moment over there.
Jonathan: No. How was your summer?
Will: It was pretty good. The last two summers we have taken a Europe trip. This time around we decided in early June to do it. My wife was saying, listen, I have seen less of you this year than any year before. So we went, five of us. We've had seven the last two years. It was a lot cheaper this time going with five. We hit France, Switzerland, and Italy. We like to move around a lot after three or four nights.
Will: But the interesting thing, on the way back we're flying out of Italy, we're over the Atlantic, and a gentleman about 30 years old right in front of me starts having a seizure. Thirty minutes goes by. We have three doctors right around, including an ER doc, very fortunate for him. They start stabilizing him. He has another seizure. And then they make the decision: you know what, we're two and a half hours from New York, but if we turn around and go back to Iceland, we can get there in an hour and a half. We don't have an extra hour, perhaps, for him. So they turn around and go back, and we spent 24 hours in Iceland. I hope this guy ended up being okay. But I never would have set foot there otherwise, so it was an interesting experience.
Jonathan: So, hot travel tip for our viewers. What is your favorite country to visit, or city?
Will: I'll say of our three trips, Paris has been the best because of the food there. It's the best of just about anything you can imagine. And for my wife and me, we've realized that traveling for us is over 50% food. If we don't have good food, we're like, all right, where can we go next? So yeah, that's definitely the favorite one so far.
Will: Let's dive into the number two most asked question that we see in retirement. What age should I start Social Security? This is something that we see a lot, especially when you have couples, and oftentimes couples have different ages or a different work history behind their benefit. One is much larger than the other one.
Jonathan: Everyone hears that there are different strategies for Social Security, and they assume it's actually pretty quick: I plug in my age, I plug in the dollar amount, and it's going to tell me exactly what I'm going to get and what I should do. The reality is far from it, because it's a very nuanced conversation. There are so many other variables that you have to take into effect, from taxes to what the rest of your family looks like to your health and longevity. And so one of the questions that always comes up is the breakeven number. You want to talk about the breakeven number, because that's used quite a bit?
Will: Yeah, that is definitely how most of the industry determines Social Security claiming. The basic premise, of course, is: if I can start Social Security at 62 and it's $2,000 a month, or I wait till 67 and it's $2,500, how many years am I going to have to draw at that later rate in order to catch up to the starting point if I had been taking $2,000 all along? And that's great. We look at this when we do analysis. But like you said, there are so many other factors that come into play that are very critical. What's your health? That matters a lot. Is there longevity in your family?
Will: And then one of the things that we've seen with you, when we had a couple come in and they had a big age gap, that came into play a lot. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Jonathan: Yes. The age gap is probably one of the most unique things, and not even an age gap, really, from the standpoint that typically one spouse lives longer than the other. Us men, we typically like to do a little bit more risky things. If you look at my three-year-old jumping off the couches, we do crazy stuff. My little girl is like, no, I'm not going to do this. But men typically pass away earlier than women.
Jonathan: So you usually have, whether it's the husband or the wife, someone who earns a little bit more and someone who earns a little bit less. And usually one spouse passes away much earlier than the other one. What most people forget is that when one person passes away, if you're looking at it as a whole, as a family unit, you lose one complete Social Security. You get to keep the largest Social Security check, but you don't get to keep both.
Jonathan: So that plays into a big-time form factor, especially if you have a big age gap. We've had multiple people where there might be a seven-year age gap between the husband and the wife, with the husband being older, which is fairly common. That's a huge difference, because the wife is probably expected to live an extra six years as well. So that could be a 12-year difference of her life versus when he passes away. And when she loses her Social Security and only goes to his, well, you kind of want to maximize his, or vice versa if it's the other way around.
Jonathan: So how do you factor that in with whoever the surviving spouse is going to be? Even if there was the same age, take a look at the example you used earlier. Let's say it was $2,500 a month for both spouses. Let's say they both earn the same, maximize out both at $2,500. Well, they can maximize it by waiting till age 70, so let's say then it's $3,000 a person at age 70. But they waited eight years for both of them to maximize their Social Security. What if one of them passes away at age 74?
Will: Yeah. You lose half of that immediately.
Jonathan: Yeah. And so we like to typically have whoever makes the least in Social Security start that earlier, within reason. There are other tax considerations in there, but we like to start that earlier so we can maximize the other one later. And again, it goes into cash flow. What is your cash flow situation? What does your family history look like? Because family history matters. I've met with someone once where everyone in their family passed away in their early sixties. Guess who was taking their Social Security at age 62?
Will: Yes, sure. Well, one of the analyses that I know you did for this new client of ours that you brought on, when they came in, they were planning on working. The older gentleman was planning on working almost another 10 years. He was going to have to work past the age of 70. We did a retirement projection. You then used Social Security planning, took all of these other things into consideration. He's going to be retiring what, this March coming up?
Jonathan: Yes. He's going to retire as soon as he turns 65. Technically he could have retired this fall.
Will: Yeah. So we're talking about six, seven years earlier than he anticipated.
Jonathan: Yeah. When he first came in, he was like, run the numbers at retire at age 73 and age 70.
Will: Yeah. And he's going to retire six years earlier than that. So the bottom line is, if you haven't had this kind of analysis done, this is the thing that we do all day long and it's very important. In this case it really cut nearly eight years off how far this couple would have ended up working if they had not talked to you and we had not done this analysis.
Will: Now, one other thing that we want to talk about on Social Security briefly is that in the news, the Social Security trust fund is going to run out now in 2032. This has caused some people a little bit more hesitancy on delaying till age 70. In fact, there are some people out there, I won't name names, financial gurus who have said start at 62, get what you can while you can. We have maybe not moved over all the way to that level. But the point is, it is expected that if the Social Security trust fund runs out, there would be a 22% cut to everyone's benefits at that time.
Will: I think you and I both feel like, look, Congress is waiting until the house is literally on fire to address this. We can't see them waiting and letting an actual 22% cut happen across the board to everybody. But if you are somebody and you have $500,000, a million, $2 million, or you've made $100,000 a year in income in retirement, could there be some cut to your benefits? There could. And so that does need to come into play a little bit when you're making a decision on when to claim.
Jonathan: Yeah. The government has a way of, again, we don't know what they're going to do, but they have a way of changing things where they're not reducing your benefits, but your benefits are reduced. Take a look at the One Big Beautiful Bill that just came through. It was not Social Security tax-free, but there was a lot of benefit if you're over a certain age that's going to reduce what your net payment and taxes are. That being said, somehow magically those could sunset and nobody reinstitutes them, and all of a sudden that's going to help Social Security. There are other levers they can pull as well. So they might not reduce your Social Security benefit, but your net take-home is going to be significantly less.
Jonathan: So there's always things to be looking for, and it's also making sure that the rest of our portfolio is working correctly. Are we set up for success down the road, just in case we've got to supplement a little bit more, or it doesn't keep up with inflation?
Will: That is a great overview of Social Security and some of the key things we do. Shifting gears now, our second primary topic today takes a look at the other side of things, and we're talking about kids, children. The new Trump accounts came out. July 4th is when they could be funded. This is something we're starting to hear more and more about.
Jonathan: Yeah. A lot of times the initial conversation ends up being, hey, I heard about this Trump account, sounds like a great idea, I want to help out my grandkids or my kids. Is that the best way to do it? But there are multiple accounts. There are lots of different accounts. What is typically the advice that you give?
Will: Well, that makes it very tough, because like you said, for a lot of people keeping up with all the different accounts is darn near impossible. So there are three primary accounts that we talk to clients about all the time, and that is the new Trump accounts. These came about with the idea that any child born 2025 through 2028 gets $1,000 of free money from the government that's put in an account invested in the markets, and then they cannot touch it till age 18 for any reason.
Will: We did a blog on these in March that folks can go read for more details, but what was pretty cool in there, I did an analysis. If you just took that $1,000, put no additional money in there, and let that cook for basically over 50 years, because it becomes an IRA, at an 8% rate of return, that can become almost $100,000. That's almost 100x. And what I'm hoping for, and I know you too, is that a lot of people who have no exposure, and there are a lot of people out there who don't have a penny invested and don't know anything about investing, hopefully this is a way that more people can learn about investing.
Will: The other thing about Trump accounts is you can put up to $5,000 per year in there. And if you are a grandparent, that is a great thing that you can do for your grandkids. Do they really need a 45th toy at the holidays or during birthdays anymore? In your family with the 11 kids, does everyone need 15 toys from everybody? So listen, if you can have a Trump account, put money in there. It's a great way for them to learn about investing and for them to grow. And if you add money to it, it can become a significant amount of money in 20, 30, 40, 50 years. The longer they can leave it, it can become a million dollars plus. So those are a great piece.
Will: The other one to mention here is of course the 529s. College accounts, basically, is what these are set up for. Education. You and I have seen for the last 20, 30 years that there are parents who have literally made funding these accounts the number one priority. And we've seen that blow up in their faces.
Jonathan: Yeah, that's our number one pet peeve with 529s. There are multiple things with 529s, but one of them is they focus so hard on this. You want to give your kids a debt-free college education, and that's great, but they do it at the sacrifice of everything else. And then they're like, well, I'm going to wait till I inherit money, or whatever that looks like. And they jeopardize their future.
Will: Yeah. Which actually puts their future back onto their kids.
Jonathan: Yeah. And so it's just unneeded. It's trying to be wise from that standpoint.
Will: And then we both have a huge pet peeve about 529s, and this is two things that we're about to talk about. Number one, that you can only make trades twice a year. There have been scenarios before where someone goes in a couple of times a year, rebalances, makes some adjustments, some tweaks to the account, the stock market then has a 30% or 40% selloff, and they think, I'm going to go in and do some buying, this is a great opportunity, and they go in and they can't make any trades because they had already done their two times per year. That just seems crazy in the year 2026 that we still have those kinds of limitations.
Will: The other thing is you have to pick a state that you're going to open it in, and you're limited to just the fund family that the state made an agreement with. If you want to buy some other positions in there, you can't do it.
Jonathan: Oh yeah, it's terrible. It's very frustrating. You're stuck with the same fund family. You're very limited on it all. So it is a great vehicle, it can be a very great vehicle to use.
Will: But there's one other account that we actually prefer the most, which is the UTMA account, the Uniform Transfers to Minors Act account. You don't get the kind of tax savings here that you do in those other two, the Trump accounts and the 529. But you get something probably better, and that is the financial literacy piece.
Will: Here's what I mean by this. It's the only account that you can go in and buy individual stocks. And I've seen this pay off with my sons. My older sons are 21 and 19. When they were seven, eight years old, I started buying for them in their UTMA accounts. Let them pick. What's a company that you know? And they knew Apple, or they knew Nike, or Disney.
Jonathan: We wouldn't want Nike or Disney anywhere near the portfolios now. They have not done well.
Will: Terrible, but that's a separate topic. But it's the idea of helping them learn what a stock is and helping them get interested in investing. When it's buying these index funds, they are not going to be able to pick that up in the same way they can on these brands. And I've had a lot of people that I've told this idea to that have done this with their kids, and then they've come back to me 5 or 10 years later and said, hey, that really made a huge difference. My kids now understand a lot about investing. They enjoy it. They like learning about companies. You don't get that in the 529s and in the Trump accounts.
Will: So I think we fall on the side that says, look, don't put all your eggs in one basket here. Don't just pick one kind of account. Pick a couple of these. And there's going to be real benefit to you if you do that.
Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. And some of it right now, if you have a new baby, we just had one last year, the Trump account, it's free money. Go ahead, take advantage of it.
Jonathan: But it's using the multiple different accounts for different purposes that's going to be the most efficient and most effective. Same thing as goes in retirement, right? We're using multiple different accounts for different purposes, and it makes for the best overall return.
Will: Now, our segment, client Q&A. This is a segment we did in our first video. We would say it's sweeping the nation, but we probably didn't have more than about four or five friends or family who made it 30 minutes into our last video to see the client Q&A. What do we have for today?
Jonathan: All right, so let's dive in. Rapid fire. Why are data centers such a hot button topic right now?
Will: Wow. This is interesting, because we have had a couple of clients ask us this question. I have a theory. Data centers are what's being built around the country because Amazon and Microsoft and Google and even Meta, they need compute. They have companies, especially those first three, coming to them saying, hey, we need as much compute as we can to build on our AI ambitions. Well, we have to build these warehouses and get the equipment and we need power, and there is a race, a gold rush if you will, to get this.
Will: Here's one of the reasons that I think there are people pushing back against this. We heard for two years nonstop that AI is going to destroy jobs, it's going to take your jobs. Elon Musk at one point was saying we're going to have a 20% unemployment rate by 2030. Sam Altman, who of course is the CEO of OpenAI, ChatGPT, constantly was talking about widespread job loss. And I think a lot of people heard enough of this and said to themselves, okay, why are we letting this happen then? Why would we want this to happen? Let's push back a little bit. And so data centers, and opposing them, was a big way that you could push back.
Will: I think we've got two sides here. We have one side pro data center, and that's these companies saying, hey, there are new jobs being created, there's going to be new infrastructure built, that's a positive, and we're going to build new power facilities. So there were a lot of pluses there. On the other side, the argument was, this is bad for the environment, you're tapping into the grid and using power that the folks need, and so prices are going up.
Will: I think right now the truth is somewhere in the middle. There are enough states, both Texas and New York, opposite politically, both of them are saying, look, let's take a little hold here and at least ask questions and make sure this is being done the right way. I think that's a good thing. Let's see what the impact's going to be, because there are a lot of data centers that have already been built and are now in effect. Let's see what happens here before we just build these anywhere we can.
Jonathan: Yeah. So along this line then, the question is, with AI getting so much attention, what hidden gem sectors are being overlooked and are great buys now? I'll put a little context in there, give you breathing room. AI is going to affect everything in some form or fashion. You have, as basic as autocorrecting your spelling, that's a form of AI. So it's going to affect everyone in some form or function. But relatively speaking, it still feels like it permeates every conversation, and it's still relatively small. We're still going to the grocery store, Walmart, Kroger around here, Publix. Most of our life is still done more analog than all this AI stuff. So what are the other sectors? What are we missing?
Will: I think it's going to be something where you go industry by industry, and AI is going to have a different impact depending on where you are. Mark Cuban gave an interview where he said he got his start selling computers, going door to door to businesses in the '80s and trying to sell computers to regular business owners who didn't know a thing about them. Many of them said, I'm never going to need these, I'm never going to use those, why would I pay you? That's how he cut his teeth. He said he thinks that same opportunity is available now. In fact, I'm trying to get my older sons and a couple of their buddies to do what I'm about to tell you. He said, I think that every month that goes by we're going to see more and more opportunities for regular businesses to use AI and to see a big improvement in revenue, cutting down expenses, and it's just going to be industry by industry on how to do that.
Will: As far as overlooked opportunities, you don't have to go back very far. Just a couple of months ago, in fact a month ago, all these software names were down. We had Shopify and Microsoft earlier in the year, CrowdStrike in client portfolios, that had gone down a lot because everybody was chasing the AI winners and they thought these are going to be the AI losers, and the market got that wrong. These software names were amazing bargains. It's only been in the last few weeks that the market's been realizing that, and a lot of these stocks have gone up a lot. So there are definitely going to be opportunities as we go along to make money outside the glare of AI.
Jonathan: Yeah, I think it's a good reminder for everyone in investments and in this day and age that it is a marathon, not a sprint. You've got to look at things over the bigger time horizon. Don't be stupid in the short term, but a lot of these investment plays take years and sometimes take a decade to fully play itself out. You still have companies right now that have been succeeding for 10 plus years, but in the moment, 10 years ago, people were saying, is this just going to be a one-year pop? Some of them did, some of them didn't.
Will: The last thing on that point is, in the late '90s, the internet, all the excitement, we had the internet bubble. If you think about most of the best winners of the internet era, I'd put Google in there, I'd put Meta in there, Netflix. Those stocks were not even trading publicly in the late '90s. Most of the ones that came public went bankrupt. The one that was trading then that did become a star was Amazon, but at the time they were an online bookstore, and the stock dropped 95% between 2000 and 2002. Virtually no one envisioned Amazon would become what they are today. So yes, you're exactly right. It is a marathon, not a sprint.
Jonathan: So we had someone say, hey, I need a good family dinner recipe for this weekend. Any favorites?
Will: Okay, you know what, I am going to pitch that over to you, because I will tell you, I was talking to Krista and we were talking about recipes, and I said, I don't think I've made a dinner from a recipe in my life. And I'm pretty sure I have not. So if it's not grilling burgers or chicken, I do make my smoothies in the morning, that's about the extent of recipes for me. You, though, on the other hand, different story. So why don't you tell us what is a good dinner idea? We may not have many people watching that have 11 children like you, but if someone has a couple of kids, what's something that you would suggest that you make?
Jonathan: Well, I am going to suggest something in the theme of what will be next month, which is, it's about to be football season, so we're going to have a little hard time back and forth. Sheboygan is up in Wisconsin, and a good old beer brat is fantastic. So you take your bratwurst and you grill them. However you want to grill them, grill them. And then on the side you're going to grill up some onions and some bell peppers. When you're done grilling the bratwurst, you're going to put them in a big crock pot. Get some cheap beer. Throw in the caramelized onions and bell peppers and the cheap beer, and let it simmer for a couple of hours. And when it's done, it is fantastic.
Jonathan: It's not even a hot dog. It's a disgrace to hot dogs. It is the best beer brat. A Sheboygan is a Sheboygan beer brat, because some people will put it in the pot first and then grill it later. But no, you've got to grill it first, put it in the pot later. Do some French fries.
Will: Well, listen, my head is spinning on this. I think I'm going to rely on you to do that and invite me over and let me try that. Is that fair?
Jonathan: We'll watch the Packers.
Will: All right. Well, we are going to wrap things up. Listen, if you haven't checked out our website recently, we have a brand new investing page and a brand new retirement page that have just gone live. Go check those out. We spend a lot of time on these. We hope you'll learn a lot more about us. If you are new to Sentara from that, you can go to the contact page and reach out. If you want us to take a look at your Social Security options or do a retirement plan, we can help you with that. Well, thanks for watching. Take care.
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