Company

Our Mission

It cannot be better and more succinctly put than as stated on our website:

Our firm is dedicated to helping clients answer the following important question: "What is the best age to claim my Social Security benefits?" Answering this question correctly is very important because many thousands of dollars are at stake. Indeed, the evidence suggests that every year a majority of new Social Security claimants are making choices that leave those thousands of dollars on the table...
We've created specialized software that allows us to offer you detailed quantitative information about the financial advantages or disadvantages of claiming your Social Security benefits at various ages. What is more, the information we provide you takes into account your specific circumstances. Unlike the "one-size-fits-all" financial advice columns, our analyses and reports are customized for each client.

Unless you are an American citizen who qualifies for Social Security and is approaching retirement age, this may not mean a whole lot to you. The take-away is this: We've worked over the last five years to take a very complex (over 2,000 rules) problem which is all too often misunderstood and create a computationally efficient and easy-to-use website and supporting code-base that provides mathematically accurate answers to this problem. Our mission is to keep improving on this accomplishment by making our system easier to use, faster to experiment with, and ultimately more valuable for the US citizens out there who need clear and accurate answers so desperately in the face of a very complicated decision.

My Role

My official role at Social Security Choices is co-founder and partner, and serve as the lead on almost anything technically related within our firm.

During my time in this role, amongst other responsibilities, I have built and maintain our entire website (from scratch, not on the back of some CMS or from a template), which spans over 150 pages (not including dynamic permutations), and similarly designed, built and maintain the database schema and all associated stored procedures our product relies upon. All told, there are in excess of ten thousand lines of code over those pages to ease the process of ordering and using our product on the website, not including any database related code.

In addition to my role as web lead, I have written all of our back-end code in collaboration with one of our Economists and co-founders Bill Dowd. I cannot go into details about this code for intellectual property reasons, but can say it is written largely in C and Perl, runs absurdly fast for how many potential financial situations it is examining, and generates reports in a completely automatic and failure-tolerant fashion for our customers.

Last, beyond web and core coding responsibilities, I also participate in the full spectrum of business development and outreach discussions and efforts that come with starting and piloting a start-up to success.