The financial news that actually matters
Covers Social Security benefits, eligibility rules, payment calculations, and policy changes. It explains how benefits are determined and how they impact retirement income.
Two of the most common sources of guaranteed retirement income can look almost identical on a monthly statement. A Social Security payment and an annuity check both arrive on schedule, both promise to keep coming for life, and both feel like a bedrock a household can count on. Yet one of them is quietly designed…
In households where one partner earned most or all of the income, the other often assumes retirement will leave them with little Social Security of their own. That assumption sells the program short. Social Security’s spousal benefit is built for exactly this situation, paying a husband or wife up to half of the higher earner’s…
The age at which a retiree can collect a full, unreduced Social Security benefit has finished a slow climb that lawmakers set in motion decades ago. For everyone born in 1960 or later, that age is now 67 — not the 65 that still lives in many people’s minds, and not the 66 that applied…
When a Social Security recipient dies, surviving family members often assume the program will help cover the immediate expenses that follow. What Social Security actually offers as a one-time death benefit is a single payment of $255 — an amount that has not changed in roughly seventy years. For a generation that has watched the…
A large share of Americans claim Social Security the moment they become eligible at 62, and many of them are still working when they do. What often comes as a surprise is that a long-standing rule can hold back part of that early check for anyone under full retirement age who earns more than a…
For many older Americans, a marriage that ended years, or even decades, ago still holds a piece of financial value that quietly goes unclaimed. Social Security allows a divorced person to draw a monthly benefit built on a former spouse’s earnings record, and choosing to do so takes nothing away from that former spouse. The…
When the Social Security Administration pays a beneficiary more than the rules allow, it treats the surplus as a debt to be collected, even when the error was the agency’s own. For years the government recovered those overpayments gently, shaving a small slice off each monthly check. That approach has since hardened, and the current…
Every Social Security retirement check is built on a single document: the worker’s lifetime earnings record. The agency adds up a person’s highest-earning years to set the benefit, so a year that is missing or reported wrong can quietly shrink the monthly payment for the rest of that person’s life. In most cases, the only…
When a husband or wife dies, Social Security can pay the survivor a benefit based on the deceased spouse’s earnings, often for the rest of the survivor’s life. What many widows and widowers do not realize is that a decision as personal as whether and when to remarry can quietly switch that benefit off. The…
Many retirees turn on Social Security at full retirement age out of habit, only to discover a year or two later that they did not actually need the money yet. Social Security offers a way to hit pause on those payments and let the eventual benefit climb, and the increase it buys ranks among the…