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If You Die Young: How to Calculate Social Security Survivor Benefits (what everyone between the ages of 22-55 should know)

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dying before retirement age and social security survivor benefits

Jo’s husband died when he was 44. Jo was only 43, and up until that point, they ran a successful plumbing supply business together. Jo and her husband earned a high income, and his passing left her with the burden of running a demanding business alone.

She didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about her future Social Security benefits at that point of her life. But things are different now.

Jo is about to turn 60. She’s been told that she can qualify for Social Security survivors benefits, and has also heard that the Social Security Administration has a history of miscalculating these benefits — so Jo wants to make sure she understands the math herself.

You Can’t Use the Normal Calculations to Understand Social Security Survivors Benefits

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The Maximum Social Security Benefit

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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.

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Social Security Spousal Benefits: The Complete Guide

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GUIDE TO SOCIAL SECURITY SPOUSAL BENEFITS

What’s one of the most generous benefits available to retirees? That’s easy. It’s Social Security spousal benefits! These benefits are some of the most important, too.

Why? Because the spousal benefit can give your household income a big boost if you know all the rules about how to use it.  

A recent Social Security report found that 2.3 million individuals received at least part of their benefit as a spouse of an entitled worker. Some of these spouses had benefits of their own, but were eligible to receive higher benefit because the spousal benefit amount was greater than their own benefit.

Others never worked outside the home or paid Social Security tax. They have no benefit of their own, but thanks to the Social Security spousal benefit available under their spouse’s work record, they can still receive payments.

This particular benefit doesn’t just provide retirement income, either.

As an eligible spouse, you could also receive premium-free Medicare benefits. Receiving these can help you reduce your out-of-pocket healthcare costs, allowing you to stretch your nest egg even further to create the retirement you want.

Clearly, Social Security spousal benefits offer serious value to those approaching the right age to file. So how do you access them, and what do you have to know to best work the rules?

Let’s take a look at what it takes to qualify as well as what benefits you may receive as an eligible spouse.

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Should You Trust Your Social Security Benefits Estimate?

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Should you trust your social security estimate

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.

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Single or Joint Income: What Counts for the Social Security Earnings Test?

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If you haven’t yet reached your full retirement age but want to file early for your Social Security benefits, you need to know there’s an earnings limit.

In other words, if you earn over a certain amount of income… your benefits may be reduced.

We’ve talked about this at length on both this blog and my YouTube channel, and we field a lot of questions about this topic. One of the questions I hear all the time from married couples is this one:

“Whose earnings are they counting? If you’re married, can your spouse’s earnings affect your Social Security benefit?”

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Social Security Income Limit: What Counts as Income?

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You may already know that if you’re under full retirement age and file for Social Security benefits, there’s a limit to the amount of income you can make before your benefit is reduced — or shut off completely.

But there’s one big question that keeps coming up when I talk to people about this topic: What income counts towards the Social Security earnings limit?

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Should You Apply for Social Security Disability or Retirement Benefits?

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the choice of filing for ssdi can be difficult

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.

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Will The Social Security Administration Close Their Field Offices?

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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.

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How to (Correctly) Stop Social Security Benefits

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how to stop your social security benefit

Most of us spend a lot of time figuring out how to maximize the benefits we can receive from Social Security. After all, when we’re talking about retirement, every extra income stream and every dollar makes a difference.

So it might sound strange at first to talk about how to stop your Social Security benefits from coming in. But in some situations, there are a number of reasons why stopping your Social Security benefit is the right thing to do.

There’s a right way to do this, and a wrong way — and you need to know the difference so you can understand when it makes sense to turn off Social Security benefits, and how to do it correctly so that action doesn’t come back to bite you down the road.

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