Greg's reading glasses were pushed up on his forehead, which means he had given up on them, and he was squinting at the laptop from about four inches away. "It wants me to verify who I am again. I know who I am."
It took us most of a Sunday afternoon, between the new water heater (the old one quit on July 9, another story) and a thunderstorm that knocked the power out for twenty minutes, but we each got into our own Social Security accounts and downloaded our statements. Then we printed them and sat at the kitchen table with the green notebook, because that's how I think.
Greg's statement
Greg has paid into Social Security since he bagged groceries at sixteen, so his record is long and steady. He was born in 1967, so his full retirement age is 67. The statement shows an estimate for each age you could start. These are the three we circled:
- At 62: about $1,990 a month
- At 67: about $2,840 a month
- At 70: about $3,520 a month
The statement says these assume he keeps earning about what he earns now until he claims. He plans to stop driving at about 64, so the real numbers may come in a little lower. With more than forty years on his record, I don't expect a few missing years to change much, but that's my reading, not a promise.
The spread between 62 and 70 is $1,530 a month. That stopped both of us. Greg's first instinct was 62, "because who knows." Mine was 70, because I'm a saver by nature and the number is bigger. We ended the afternoon somewhere in the middle, and for a reason I hadn't thought about before.
If Greg dies first, and he's older and a man, so the odds say he might, I would get a survivor benefit based on his amount. The bigger his check, the bigger mine would be as a widow. Waiting isn't only about Greg. It's a kind of insurance for me. Greg said, "So you want me to wait so you get more money when I'm dead." Well, when you put it that way.
Our working plan: he retires around 64, we live on his 401(k) and savings for a few years, and he claims somewhere between 67 and 70. We'll decide the exact year closer to the time.
My statement, and the thin record
Mine was a shorter read. For my 24 years at the school, I paid into SERS, Ohio's school employee retirement system, instead of Social Security. Ohio school employees generally don't pay into Social Security on those wages. So my record only shows the years before: a bank teller job and then a loan office, from 1988 until Emily was born.
That's about ten years of modest pay. My own estimate at 67 is about $610 a month.
As a spouse, I may be able to get more than my own amount, up to half of Greg's full-retirement-age benefit if I wait until my own full retirement age. Half of $2,840 is $1,420. That's not a promise either. The rules about when each of us files matter, and I'm not going to pretend I have them all straight.
For years, people in my situation heard about two rules that cut benefits for anyone with a pension from work that didn't pay into Social Security. One reduced your own benefit, and another could shrink a spouse or survivor benefit, sometimes to almost nothing. In January, the Social Security Fairness Act was signed and repealed both. I heard about those rules in the staff lounge for twenty years, so this was the best news on either statement. I couldn't tell from the printout alone exactly how my estimate reflects the change, so it went on the question list.
The questions it raised
The statement lists your earnings year by year, and that turned out to be the most useful page. Mine shows 1994 at about half what I remember earning. I still have the W-2s in a shoebox in the basement, of course, and I plan to compare.
The rest of my list:
How does my spousal amount work if Greg waits to 70 but I want to file at 67? What, if anything, should I double-check about my estimate now that the old reductions are gone? And if I do part-time work this fall, as planned, how much do a few more years of small earnings move my own number? Probably not much, but I'd like to see it.
I'm not an expert, and Social Security has real people whose job is to answer these questions. I'll be calling them. If you haven't downloaded your statement in a while, do it this weekend. It's free, it takes an hour including the password fight, and it will tell you something you didn't know.
