This article provides several examples of Social Security spousal benefit calculations and coordination to help you understand how it all works.
delayed retirement credit
Delayed Retirement Credits – When are These Applied?
If you delay filing for your Social Security benefit, for each month that you delay you will earn delayed retirement credits. The increase for each month of delayed retirement credit is 2/3% (0.667%) for every month. This equates to 8% in delayed retirement credits for every year of delay. But when are these credits applied to your benefit? As with so many Social Security-related calculations, timing is everything. With delayed retirement credits, the key is exactly when you stop delaying and start collecting benefits. Starting Benefits Before Age 70 When you’re delaying benefits past your full retirement age (FRA), you can start receiving benefits at any age after FRA up to age 70. So, for example, if you decided to start your benefits upon the month of your 67th birthday, you’d have 8% in credits earned if your FRA was age 66. For the sake of this example, let’s say […]
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Timing of Delay Credits
When you delay filing for your Social Security benefits past Full Retirement Age (FRA – age 66 if you were born between 1943 and 1954) you earn Delay Credits for each month that you delay. The credit amount is 2/3% per month, or a total of 8% for every 12 months of delay. When you file for benefits after delaying, these credits are applied to your PIA. The timing of the application of your credits is not immediate, though. Delay credits are added to your benefit only at the beginning of a new year, so this can cause a bit of confusion as you begin receiving benefits. Example For example, Janice was born on October 14, 1949, so she will turn age 66 on October 14, 2015. Janice’s PIA is $1,000. If you’ll remember from this post (When is Your Social Security Birthday), Social Security considers Janice to have reached […]
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Delayed Retirement Credits for Social Security
When you delay filing for your Social Security retirement benefit until after your Full Retirement Age (FRA), your future benefit increases due to a factor known as Delayed Retirement Credits, or DRCs. These credits accrue at the rate of 2/3% for each month of delay, which equates to 8% for every full year of delay. It’s important to know a few facts about DRCs. For one – the delayed retirement credits are accumulative, not compounding. If your Full Retirement Age is 66 (if you were born between 1943 and 1954), you can accrue a full 32% in DRCs. This means that the amount of benefit that you would normally receive at FRA (which is your Primary Insurance Amount, or PIA) would be multiplied by 132% at your age 70. If your FRA is above age 66, your maximum delayed retirement credit is something less than 32% – as little as […]
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Should You Delay Retirement?
The question of delaying retirement may arise as you get closer to your “goal year” of when you want to retire. For some individuals’ fortunate enough to be covered under a company or state pension, it can be tempting to retire as soon as possible and collect the pension benefit. The same may be true for folks wanting to start taking Social Security at age 62. Before making the decision to retire or retire early an individual should consider the effects on delaying retirement and continuing to work. This is assuming that they can accrue extra pension benefits for the extra years of service. For Social Security, this would be delaying past an individual’s normal retirement age as long as to age 70. For example, let’s say an individual has the opportunity to be eligible to retire at age 55 and receive a pension of $5,500 per month. However, if […]
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How to Compute Your Monthly Social Security Benefit
So you’ve seen your statement from Social Security, showing what your benefit might be at various stages in your life. But not everyone files for benefits at exactly age 62 or 66 – quite often there are months or years that pass before you actually file. This article will show you how to compute your monthly Social Security benefit, no matter when you file. Computing your monthly Social Security benefit First of all, in order to compute your monthly Social Security benefit, you need to know two things: your Primary Insurance Amount (PIA) and your Full Retirement Age (FRA). The PIA is rather complicated to define, but for a shorthand version of this figure, you might use the figure that is on your statement from Social Security as payable to you on your Full Retirement Age (or “normal” retirement age).
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File Now. Suspend Later.
Suspending benefits is a facet of Social Security filing that usually only gets written about in connection with filing – File and Suspend is often referred to as a single act, but it’s actually two things. First you file for your benefits, which is a definite action with the Social Security Administration, establishing a filed application on your record. Then, you voluntarily suspend receiving benefits. If this happens all at once, the end result is that you have an application filed with SSA, but you’re not receiving benefits. Since you have an application filed (in SSA parlance, you’re entitled to benefits), your spouse and/or dependents may be eligible for a benefit based on your record. Since you are not receiving benefits, your record earns delayed retirement credits (DRCs) of 2/3% per month that you delay receipt of benefits past your Full Retirement Age (FRA). (Note: you can only suspend receipt […]
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Social Security Spousal Benefit at or After FRA
Some time ago I wrote an article on the Social Security Spousal Benefit Before FRA, and an astute reader (thanks, SD!) pointed out the obvious to me: I hadn’t written the complementary piece on calculating the spousal benefit at or after FRA. So let’s get right to it! When you wait until Full Retirement Age to file for spousal benefits, there is no reduction of that portion of your benefits. In other words, the spousal benefit will be based on 50% of your spouse’s PIA minus your own PIA, and then this amount will be added to whatever retirement benefit that you’re receiving on your own record. This additional benefit can’t increase your total benefit to a point greater than 50% of your spouse’s PIA. Here are some examples: Started own benefits early Alice and Terry are both age 66. Alice started her own benefit early, at age 62. Her […]
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A Good Reason to File and Suspend: Back Benefits
Note: with the passage of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 into law, File & Suspend and Restricted Application have been effectively eliminated for anyone born in 1954 or later. If born before 1954 there are some options still available, but these are limited as well. Please see the article The Death of File & Suspend and Restricted Application for more details. In particular, the provision discussed below is no longer available to anyone. We’ve discussed the file and suspend option in the past as it relates to enabling your spouse or dependents to begin receiving benefits based on your record while you delay filing to accrue the delay credits. But there’s another reason that you might want to file and suspend at Full Retirement Age (FRA) – and this one has little to do with a spouse, even single folks can take advantage of this. When you file and […]
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A Few Things for a Single Person to Consider When Planning Social Security Filing
The decision of when to begin receiving Social Security benefits can be a bit daunting, because there are many things to take into account when making this decision. The basic concept of the lifetime value of benefits taken at various ages is the most common thing to consider, when this is really not as important as you might think. This is especially true for single person – since the benefit reduction and increase factors are designed to achieve a similar lifetime result for the average lifespan. In other words, if you are an average person with an average lifespan, it won’t make much difference at what age you file for benefits, as you’ll receive approximately the same amount by the end of your average life, whenever you begin receiving the benefits. However. Another factor that you need to keep in mind is how Social Security benefits are treated, tax-wise. At […]
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The Real Breakeven Point for Delaying Your Own Social Security Benefit and Taking the Spousal Benefit
Recently there was an article that I was involved with where we were reviewing the strategies of taking a restricted spousal benefit and therefore delaying your own benefit versus taking your own benefit. An astute reader (Thanks BL!) pointed out that there was a bit of a flaw in the logic on the costs of delaying, and therefore a significant difference in the breakeven period. Briefly, the example went as follows: Say the wife, Michelle, has a PIA of $1,300 and Mike has a PIA of $2,500. They’re both age 66, and Michelle files the restricted app and is eligible to receive $1,250 (half of Mike’s), which is only $50 less than she would receive if she filed for her own benefit. After four years of delay, she has given up $2,400 ($50 times 48 months) but now her benefit is $1,716 – $416 more than she would have received […]
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Another Good Reason to Delay Social Security Benefits
As you likely know from reading many of my articles on the subject, I have long advocated the concept of delaying your Social Security benefit as long as possible. This shouldn’t be a surprise – many financial advisors have espoused this concept for maximizing retirement income. Lately there has been a white paper making the rounds, from a Prudential veep, Mr. James Mahaney, entitled Innovative Strategies to Help Maximize Social Security Benefits. The white paper supports the very theme that I wrote about a couple of years ago in the post Should I Use IRA Funds or Social Security at Age 62?. This paper seems to have struck a chord with a lot of folks, as I’ve received it no less than a dozen times from various folks wondering if the strategies Mr. Mahaney writes about would be useful to them. The point is very clear: It makes a great […]
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The Value of Your Social Security Benefits
As you consider your Social Security benefits and when you might begin to draw them, keep in mind that the benefits you’re receiving are actually akin to an annuity – a stream of income that you will receive from the time you start the benefits throughout your life. As with an annuity, if you live longer than average, you will receive much more than the original value (premium) of the annuity. If you have a way to increase the amount of the stream of income, by delaying start of the benefits, the overall amount that you eventually receive will increase as well (assuming you live longer than average). Let’s say that your Social Security benefit would be $1,500 at Full Retirement Age. If you started your benefit early at age 62, your benefit would be reduced to 75% of that amount, or $1,125; if you delayed your benefit to age […]
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Clarification on Questions About Spousal Benefits
Note: with the passage of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 into law, File & Suspend and Restricted Application have been effectively eliminated for anyone born in 1954 or later. If born before 1954 there are some options still available, but these are limited as well. Please see the article The Death of File & Suspend and Restricted Application for more details. Since I’ve been receiving quite a few inquiries about certain aspects of the Spousal Benefit, I thought I’d put up an article with a few definitive statements about this confusing part of the Social Security system. 1. If you are eligible for a Spousal Benefit and you’re under Full Retirement Age, when you file for your own benefit, you are automatically filing for both your own benefit and the Spousal Benefit at the same time. This is known as the deemed filing rule. By “eligible”, we mean that […]
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It Pays to Wait For Your Social Security Benefits
It’s usually best, for most things in the financial world, to act now rather than waiting around. The notable exception is with regard to applying for Social Security benefits. We’ve discussed it before (in fact part of this article is a re-hash of an earlier post) but it is an important point that needs more emphasis, in my opinion. As you’ll see from the table below, if you’re in the group that was born after 1943 (that’s you, Boomers!) you can increase the amount of your Social Security benefit by 8% for every year that you delay receiving benefits after your Full Retirement Age (FRA – see this article for an explanation). Delaying Receipt of Benefits to Increase the Amount If you are delaying your retirement beyond FRA, you’ll increase the amount of benefit that you are eligible to receive. Depending upon your year of birth, this amount will be […]
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