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fools if there's one number in your life that you probably have memorized it's your social security number now here at fool.com we've been spending a lot of attention lately trying to figure out how you can make the most of your social security benefit but one curiosity that came across our desk was how what exactly does your social security number me my name is Dan Caplinger I'm the Motley Fool's director of investment planning and today I want to take a closer look at your social security number to try to decipher the code behind it now until very recently actually was a rhyme or reason to the social security numbers that you got basically the first three digits of your social security number corresponding to the area where the Social Security office was that issued that number now usually that meant is very close to wherever you were born and so you might notice that people who have born in the same state might have numbers that were very close to each other whereas people who were born on the other side of the country might have much different numbers now those numbers in general they followed somewhat the same pattern as if codes where the lower numbers are in the east the higher numbers are in the west but they don't match up perfectly so don't expect that to be something that you can count on being a one-to-one match now the next two numbers the middle two numbers in the social security number correspond to a group number and that's basically the order in which those numbers were assigned but in order to avoid just going up in numerical order Social Security Administration used sort of a strange formula he started out by using odd numbers between zero one and zero nine but then they started going up even numbers from one zero all the way up to 98 none they came back filled in the even numbers from zero to two zero eight and then filled in the odd numbers from 11 to 99 then the last four digits were basically sequential based on the order now that was all well and good but a couple of years ago Social Security decided that they just were going to randomize the process and so now ever since 2011 new Social Security numbers have been randomly assigned which means you can't necessarily assume anything about where that person got that number or anything about the order now that's been helpful in fighting identity theft but it has required banks like Bank of America really pretty much from the top of the Bank chain all the way down to the smallest banks to change their verification processes to make sure they make valid IDs of their customers so just something to keep in mind the Social Security numbers still meaningful for the vast bulk of people but going forward it really doesn't mean anything for today's very young children and for the people of future now for more on social security be sure to stay tuned to fool.com thanks for watching and fool off