Knowing when to claim Social Security is complicated, but when you’re married and planning with your spouse, the calculation becomes harder.
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A few years ago, I wrote a post about the slightly contrarian viewpoint I had that you might not want to wait to claim Social Security until you hit 70 like most people think.
I did this by comparing your total benefits when claiming at age 62 (the earliest you can claim), 67 (the “full retirement age”), and 70 (maximum benefit).
What I found was that if you claim at age 70, you won’t have made more money in aggregate until you reach age 87, which might be too long for people to want to wait. And regardless, you have to wait until age 78 to see any advantage to claiming after age 62.
This troubled me, to be honest, because it seemed so patently at odds with general financial wisdom. Was I missing something?
It turns out, I think I was, and that was a little thing called marriage.
Table of Contents
Marital status
My analysis of when to claim Social Security purely rested on you and you alone, and was designed to net you the most amount of money possible of the longest term.
But my bias in that analysis was that I was single at the time, and wasn’t thinking about the considerations that come with being married.
Well, that all is a little more relevant these days for me. 😉
And it might be relevant for you too, if not now, then in the future.
Spousal support
When you’re married and you go to claim Social Security, you have a choice:
- Claim your natural amount
- Claim on your spouse’s account (between 32.5%-50% of what your spouse would be eligible for at their full retirement age).
Let’s say you are set to receive $1,000 per month based on your work history, meanwhile your spouse is entitled to $400 a month based on their working years. They get $400 plus an additional $100 to bring their total to half of your benefit. Total benefits for the household would amount to $1,500 a month. If you’re entitled to $1,000 per month but your spouse gets $1,400 you’ll receive your benefit, but not half of your spouse’s because your benefit is greater than 50% of your spouse’s benefit. The total benefits for the household would be $2,400.
Basically, for those partners where one of you made significantly more money, it might make sense for both of you to claim on the earnings of the one who made more.
If the lower-earning spouse claims at age 62, they will get 32.5% of of their spouses amount. If they wait until age 67, they will get 50%.
And since it’s probably not clear, if you’re claiming spousal benefits on someone, that someone must also have filed for Social Security already.
What about divorce?
If you’re not confused yet, keep reading.
If you’ve been married for at least 10 years, when you divorce you can still claim on your ex’s account (assuming you’re at least 62), at least until you remarry, after which you can claim on your new partner.
And here’s the interesting part: if you’ve been divorced for more than two years, the ex that you’re claiming on doesn’t even have to have filed for benefits! (This is different from if you’re still together. No, I don’t know why.)
Widows and widowers
Your spouse, if they predecease you, can offer you Social Security benefits from beyond the grave.
In fact, you can collect up to 100% of your late spouse’s benefit, depending on if you’ve reached full retirement age.
As always, there are special edge cases and fine print, and plus there are interesting considerations for widowhood then marriage, or divorce then widowhood. And so on down the line.
So when should you claim?
I have to be honest: I have no idea.
But that’s a considered response, not just me throwing my hands up in the air. The considerations on when and how to claim Social Security depend not only both of your life expectancies, but also your ages and lifetime expected benefits.
If you’re interested in playing around with theses things, there’s a very basic Social Security Spousal benefit calculator.
And, if you haven’t already, you can get much more details on your own benefits, by logging into mySocialSecurity.
Social Security is complicated. Despite this, you will benefit from having open, honest discussions about these things well in advance of when they become relevant. I know that I’m thinking about my own Social Security plan, and that plan has certainly evolved since I now have a spouse of my own to consider and plan with.
But I guess that’s a different story.
