A few weeks ago I finished a paper arguing for mandatory retirement contributions from both employers and employees. Though arguably the paper will not come close to changing public policy on retirement plans, it did raise some arguments in favor of the United States adopting a mandatory savings plan. In the paper I explained that research has shown that individuals risk not having enough saved for retirement. This could be due to employees not having a retirement plan through work or because employees face an abundance of mutual fund options in the plan that they don’t know where to begin. Some of these employees choose the default option or simply go with what a colleague recommends. Another problem the paper addresses is the declination of defined benefit pensions. Such pensions are employer sponsored and funded, thus removing funding an investment risk from the employee. At retirement the employee receives a […]
Social Security
Social Security Survivor Benefit Coordination
If you’re a widow or widower and you are eligible for Social Security Survivor’s Benefits based on your late spouse’s record, you may have some timing decisions to make that could significantly affect your overall benefits. This is especially true if you are also eligible for Social Security benefits based on your own earnings record. Timing the receipt of benefits is, as with most all Social Security benefits, the primary factor that you can control. If you have worked over your lifetime and you have a significant benefit based on your own earnings, it becomes even more important. The decision process is dependent upon the relative size of your own Social Security benefit as compared to the Survivor Benefit based on your late spouse’s record. Own SS Benefit Greater than Survivor Benefit If your own benefit will be greater than the Survivor Benefit, it could be beneficial to you in […]
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Complications with Social Security Filing for Divorcees
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. Social Security filing decisions are tough enough – and so is being divorced. Add the two together and you have all sorts of complications. In this article we’ll review one type of complication with Social Security filing for divorcees that can work in your favor and one that can work against you. Let’s start with the provision that may work against you – Deemed Filing. Deemed Filing When you file for benefits prior to Full Retirement Age (FRA, which is 66 for folks born between 1943 and 1954, […]
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Maximum WEP Impact
Rounding out our series of articles about the Windfall Elimination Provision, or WEP, I thought we should talk a bit about the maximum impact that WEP can have on you. In other articles we’ve discussed this in part, but it hasn’t necessarily been fleshed out completely. As you may know, the maximum WEP reduction is equal to the lesser of 50% of the first “bend point” for each year or 50% of the amount of the pension from income that was not subject to Social Security taxation. In 2015 this is $413 per month at most. What’s important to know is that this reduction is against your Primary Insurance Amount (PIA), not necessarily against your benefit amount. Depending upon when you file relative to your Full Retirement Age, the WEP impact to your benefit could be more or less than that amount. Wait – what? As you may recall, the […]
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File & Suspend vs. Restricted Application
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. These provisions in Social Security filing are, without a doubt, the two that cause the most confusion. Being very complicated provisions and also provisions that can be very helpful to folks wishing to maximize benefits, file & suspend and restricted application are often mis-used or completely misunderstood. So at the suggestion of a reader, seeing a comment response I’d given to another reader, I will provide some additional background on just what is the difference between these two, as well as when one is used versus the other. […]
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How Does WEP Affect My Dependents?
We’ve reviewed how WEP impacts your own benefits in prior articles. Briefly, when you’re receiving a pension based on work that was not covered by Social Security, your own Primary Insurance Amount will be reduced by as much as $413 per month (2015 figures) or 50% of the pension, whichever is less. But can this reduction to benefits affect my dependents’ benefits as well? Since the nature of the WEP calculation is to reduce your Primary Insurance Amount (PIA), that means any benefit that is based on your PIA will also be reduced. So, if your spouse is planning to receive spousal benefits based on your earnings record and your PIA is reduced due to WEP, the spousal benefit available to your spouse will also be reduced. For example, Jennifer, age 66 was a teacher for 25 years, and her employment was not covered by Social Security taxes. In addition […]
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How to Eliminate WEP
If you are receiving a pension from a non-Social Security covered job and you’re also entitled to receive Social Security benefits, the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) may reduce your Social Security benefit. There are ways that this WEP reduction can be eliminated. How to Eliminate WEP As discussed in other articles, it is possible to reduce the impact of WEP by working in a Social Security-covered job and earning “substantial earnings” ($22,050 in 2015) for 21 or more years. For the first 20 years, there is no reduction to the WEP impact. For each year of substantial earnings greater than 20, the impact of WEP is reduced by 10%. When a total of 30 years of substantial earnings have been recorded on your earnings record, WEP is eliminated completely. Another way to eliminate WEP is when the primary numberholder (the individual subject to WEP) dies. This is because WEP only […]
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When is Your Social Security Birthday?
Image by freakgirl via Flickr As you’re nearing the point when you intend to receive your Social Security benefits, it may occur to you to question just when do these milestones take effect? Just when are you considered first eligible for benefits, when are you at Full Retirement Age, and when have you reached the maximum age? When is your Social Security birthday? (it may not be when you think) For Social Security age purposes, the month of your birthdate is important – but that’s not the date at which you reach the milestone. Sometimes it’s actually the month after your birthday, the month when you are that particular age for the entire month. For example, if your birthdate is January 15, 1954, you will actually reach age 62 on January 15, 2016 – but you’ll be eligible for benefits beginning with February of 2016. On the other hand, since […]
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Spousal Benefit Filing: Real World Examples
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. This business of filing for Spousal Benefits is complicated, as we’ve discussed in the past. The options available are difficult to understand, and the timing of the choices can make real dollar differences in benefits. Recently I received a couple of messages from readers that illustrate very good examples of Spousal Benefit decisions in real life. I’ve changed a few of the facts to protect each reader’s identity, but otherwise these are real world examples. I’m using these real cases because I often hear from readers (as in […]
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Book Review: Get What’s Yours
This book, subtitled “The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security” is written by Laurence J Kotlikoff (Professor of Economics at Boston University), Philip Moeller (of PBS NewsHour) and Paul Solman (also of PBS NewsHour). With this lineup of heavyweights in the Social Security commentary space, you are right to expect a very comprehensive, easy-to-understand, explanation of the subject – and that’s just what you get. This book covers every component of the Social Security retirement and disability benefit landscape with the aim toward taking action on those components that you have a degree of control over, in order to maximize your lifetime benefits. The authors are extremely well-versed in the ins and outs of the system, providing insights not found in many other texts. In addition to the authors’ own lifetimes of experience in covering the subject, every fact in the book has been reviewed by former Social Security […]
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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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Missing your SSA-1099? Here’s How to Get It
The Social Security Administration has a lot on their plate. Along with handling the tax rolls from some 150 million-plus wage earners, servicing around 50 million retirees and surviving spouses and 11 million-plus disabled workers and dependents, there are 10,000 baby boomers reaching retirement age each day. These folks (current recipients of benefits and newly-eligible) are generating nearly half-million phone calls a day to SSA’s 800 number, and nearly 200,000 per day visiting the local offices. Every day. And they’re doing all this on administrative expenses of less than 1% of all the money they handle. Much has been written about what the SSA is not capable of doing – such as advising folks on the best way to file – but little has been written about what they are doing well. One of those things is their website.
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Why Social Security Decisions Are So Tough
If you’re facing the decision of when to file for your Social Security benefit, you’ve probably noticed just how confusing it can all be. There are so many decision-points in the system, it’s no wonder folks are confused. Depending on your point of view and how you count the decision-points, each person facing this decision has thousands of possible combinations to consider as they decide when to pull the trigger and file for benefits. Recently I was going over a decision tree that I had built to describe the decision-making process for filing, and within this review I have counted that for a single, there are 14 decision-points and a total of 96 months in which a filing decision can be made, for a total of 1,344 combinations.
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Uncoupling File & Suspend
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. By now you should be somewhat familiar with the File & Suspend strategy, where an individual files for Social Security benefits and then immediately suspends them. This strategy is often used so that the individual can enable other dependents’ benefits (such as spousal or children) based upon his or her record, while delaying receipt of his or her own benefits in order to accrue delay credits on his benefit. What you may not realize is that you don’t have to file & suspend at the same time. These […]
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Social Security Filing Strategies for the Single Person
You can listen to this article by using the podcast player below if you’re on the blog; if you’re reading this via RSS, there should be a “Play Now” link just below the title to access the audio. If you’re receiving this article via email, there should be a “Download Now” link within the text of the message to retrieve the audio file. Most Social Security filing strategies are focused on married folks, or those who have been married and are now divorced or widowed. Single folks who have never been married seem to get short shrift – but it’s not because the decisions are any less important. The reason Social Security filing strategies for the single person are not often reviewed is because there are very few things that can be done strategically for the single person’s Social Security filing. We’ll go over the primary options for a single person […]
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Making Every Month Count – Excerpt from A Social Security Owner’s Manual, 3rd Edition
You can listen to this article by using the podcast player below if you’re on the blog; if you’re reading this via RSS, there should be a “Play Now” link just below the title to access the audio. Did you realize that even delaying a few months can have a significant impact on your Social Security benefit? This is the case for all Social Security benefits, including your own, a Spousal Benefit, or a Survivor Benefit. This applies whether you are taking the benefit before FRA or after, since your age is always calculated by the month. Increase or reduction factors are applied for each month of delay or early application, respectively.
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Fixing Social Security
For quite a while now we’ve been reading the reports from the Social Security Administration’s reviews of the status of the trust fund – where the prediction is that we’ll end up in the year 2033 with only enough money to pay 77¢ on the dollar of the promised benefits from Social Security. So far this revelation has not resulted in policymakers’ taking any actual steps to fix things, but sometime someone has to act. What can be done about fixing Social Security?
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Social Security Bend Points for 2015
Along with the increases to the maximum wage base and the Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) announced by the Social Security Administration, the 2015 bend points used to calculate both the Primary Insurance Amount (PIA) for Social Security benefits were announced as well. In addition, the Family Maximum Benefit (FMax) bend points for 2015 were also announced.
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Minimize taxes by adjusting your portfolio
Since the markets have had some downturns lately, now could be a good time to make some adjustments to your portfolio, rebalancing and the like, that may help to minimize taxes. In doing so you can possibly get a bit of advantage in your tax bill from a loss you’ve experienced in your investments. If you have taxable accounts, that is, accounts that are not tax-deferred (like IRAs or 401(k) plans) when you sell your investments there is capital gains treatment on your gains and losses. If you have losses and gains in your taxable account, when you realize these losses and gains by selling the holdings, your losses are subtracted from the gains, and if the result is positive (net gains), these gains are taxed at the preferable long-term capital gains rates. I say this is preferable as the rate is less, often much less, than ordinary income tax […]
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File & Suspend and Restricted Application are NOT Equal
Note: with the passage of the Bipartisan Budget Bill 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. We’ve discussed the Social Security filing options of File & Suspend and Restricted Application many times before, but it seems that folks continue to confuse these two options. It’s easy to see why: one (File & Suspend) can be used to enable the other (Restricted Application). Also, neither option is available until the individual is at least at Full Retirement Age (FRA). It’s important to know the difference between File & Suspend and Restricted Application though – primarily because if you confuse the two when talking to the […]
Sterling Raskie, MSFS, CFP®, ChFC®
The latest in our Owner’s Manual series, A 401(k) Owner’s Manual, was published in January 2020 and is available on 
A Medicare Owner’s Manual, is updated with 2020 facts and figures. This manual is available on 
Social Security for the Suddenly Single can be found on Amazon at 
Sterling’s first book, Lose Weight Save Money, can be 
An IRA Owner’s Manual, 2nd Edition is available for purchase on Amazon. Click the link to choose the 
Jim’s book – A Social Security Owner’s Manual, is now available on Amazon. Click this link for the 
And if you’ve come here to learn about queuing waterfowl, I apologize for the confusion. You may want to discuss your question with Lester, my loyal watchduck and self-proclaimed “advisor’s advisor”.