The Social Security Administration uses the Average Wage Index (AWI) as the foundation in calculating a person’s Social Security benefit payments. Using this wage data helps ensure that benefit payments reflect the general rise in the standard of living that occurred during an individual’s working lifetime.
Retirement isn’t always final. Often, individuals will retire and file for Social Security and later decide they’d like to continue working for a while longer. When this happens, it typically leads to a few questions about the impact to their Social Security benefit.
One of the most common questions is, “what happens if you file for Social Security, but keep working? Could your benefits increase?”
I’ve also heard, “what if I’m making less in my ‘post-retirement’ job, could my Social Security benefit decrease?”
There are some cases where you can receive retroactive Social Security benefits, usually delivered via a one-time lump sum payment when you file for your retirement benefit.
Overall, this can sound like a great deal. It might feel like a little extra, and the lump sum means you can do what you want with that money right away instead of waiting for it to come to you in monthly payments.
But are retroactive Social Security benefits truly a good thing? Here’s what you need to know to make this decision for yourself.
On paper, the Social Security system has a generous payment to beneficiaries of someone who retires, dies, or becomes disabled. But what catches many people by surprise is that there’s a limit to these payments.
The Social Security family maximum benefits rule may stop you from getting the full amount you might expect.
This article takes a very deep dive into the issue to explain both the common, well-known rules around the Social Security family maximum benefits — and the more obscure rules that cause benefits to be capped to a range of 150%-188% of a retired, deceased or disabled individual’s full retirement age benefit.
We’ll also go over the calculation, and teach you how to determine what kinds of benefits to expect in your own situation.
It’s rare for me to have a guest article on my site. However, a few weeks ago, I had a meeting that disturbed me. As soon as the meeting was over I contacted Texas Elder Law Attorney John Ross and asked him to write this guide for my readers on how to use Medicaid Long Term Care to pay for nursing home expenses.
I just couldn’t see a story like this happen again.
It’s been a few weeks now, but I still think about this meeting often. Listening to the woman that I met with her and her story was heartbreaking. I felt so sorry for her — but there was nothing I could do to help her.
I’m sharing her story with you here in hopes that someone else won’t make the same mistakes.
If you are attaining full retirement age in 2023, your maximum Social Security benefit is between $3,500 and $3,800.
That’s no small sum! If you wanted to get that same amount of income from a portfolio of retirement savings you’d need A LOT of money at the beginning of your retirement.
And it could get even better for you if you waited to file for Social Security. In 2023, the maximum Social Security benefit for an individual who delayed filing for benefits until age 70 is $4,555 per month. That’s more than $54,000 per year in benefits!
With dollars like these at stake, it makes good sense to pay attention to the best filing strategies for you — and how to potentially claim the maximum Social Security benefit.
If you’re building a retirement income plan (and I hope you are!), Social Security will likely play a role. As such, you need to know what to expect in Social Security benefits when constructing your plan to ensure it works.
Unfortunately, your Social Security benefits estimate from the statements you can pull from the Social Security Administration is not the best source of information on what to expect in the future.
The issue lies with the omissions that the Administration makes with their estimate methodology. To understand why this is a problem, we need to start with a basic overview of the calculation used to create your Social Security benefit estimate.
With a system as complex as Social Security, it’s inevitable that misinformation (or simply a misunderstanding of the facts) will spread. It’s hard to understand what’s true and what’s not, and often, our brains prefer the version of events that feel intuitively more simple to understand.
And of course, Social Security is anything but simple to understand.
If you’re retiring early for health reasons, do you know what benefit to file for when you claim Social Security?
Most people don’t, and simply assume they just need to file for retirement benefits. But if you could receive disability benefits instead, choosing to file normally could cause you to miss out on a lot of money.
Let me tell you this story to explain how.
The Social Security Administration will not be the same in 10 years. They have a plan that is rapidly unfolding and some of this is detailed in their “Vision 2025” strategic plan.
You might have heard a little about this already. The Administration has a webpage devoted to it — but to really get into the meat of what the Social Security Administration plans to do next, you have to dive into the supporting studies.
Let’s take a look together in this article. I’ll help you cover the entire spectrum of what the Social Security Administration (or SSA) has in the works… and what I see as the biggest challenge to getting this off the ground.