Retirement Planning: Social Security, Medicare & Your Money After Work

A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing

The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Retirement Planning: Social Security, Medicare & Your Money After Work course, in the Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.

Retirement is the one transition where almost every system changes at once. The paycheck stops. Income arrives instead from a benefit you claim once, at an age you choose inside a window, under an adjustment you cannot redo; from health coverage you select in an enrollment window, with penalties that follow you for life if you miss it; and from savings you built over decades, which you must now draw down in an order that decides how much tax you pay every year for the rest of your life. No one hands you the page where they fit together. This course is that page.

You learn the systems whole, in the order households decide them. How a benefit is built from your earnings record and what the top thirty-five years do to it; when to claim, and what the claim does to the survivor who will one day claim alone; how Medicare's four parts actually fit, when and how to enroll, how to choose between its two coverage paths and how to fill the gaps each leaves.

It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — The Income Systems: Social Security and Medicare — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Claiming-and-Coverage Decision; then, Module 2 — Drawing It Down and Holding It for Decades — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Money-After-Work Plan: spending shape, withdrawal order, taxes after the paycheck, required distributions, the bridge years, the long risks, housing, protection, and the annual review standard.

Both capstones produce real artifacts — the claiming-and-coverage decision document, and the money-after-work plan itself: the claiming record, the coverage record, the withdrawal and tax routine, and the annual review date, written for your own household and ready to use.

The honesty standard is part of the course. This course gives no individualized advice — to you, to its running household, or to anyone. It teaches general education about how the pieces fit: how the decisions connect, what each decision turns on, how to run the arithmetic on stipulated figures, and when the honest next step is a professional. Every rule is stated as published at the time of writing, in November 2026 — verify the current figure, age, threshold and window before you act. Every household figure in the course is a stipulated teaching figure, invented for the arithmetic and labeled as such.

The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.

Retirement Planning: Social Security, Medicare & Your Money After Work is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.