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.
Claiming Social Security does not require leaving the workforce, and continuing to work afterward can do more than provide extra income: it can permanently raise the size of the monthly benefit itself. Two separate mechanisms are responsible for that increase, and confusing them leads many near-retirees to misjudge how the system will actually respond to…
Social Security is often treated as a benefit that arrives tax-free, but for a large and growing share of retirees, a portion of every check is taxable income. The share can run as high as 85%, and the rule that decides it has stayed essentially unchanged for decades even as retirees’ other income has climbed…
Supplemental Security Income delivers a monthly federal payment to some of the lowest-income Americans age 65 and older, along with people who are blind or have a qualifying disability, yet a meaningful share of those who qualify never file a claim for it. The program runs alongside Social Security’s retirement and disability benefits, using the…
A one-income household does not necessarily mean one Social Security check. A spouse who spent a career raising children, running a household, or otherwise never paid into Social Security through a job can still qualify for a monthly benefit worth up to half of the working spouse’s amount, funded entirely off the other person’s earnings…
Social Security cannot legally pay a benefit for the calendar month in which a recipient dies, no matter how the payment calendar happens to line up. Because the agency pays each month’s benefit the following month, a family sometimes sees one more deposit land in the account after a death, and that deposit is not…
Every month someone puts off starting Social Security past full retirement age, the eventual check grows a little larger, and the growth is not trivial. For anyone born in 1943 or later, the increase works out to about 8% for each full year of delay, compounding until age 70. Understanding exactly how that math works,…
A federal law that took effect at the start of 2024 quietly rewrote the Social Security math for millions of retired public servants, and by now most of the paperwork behind it has already been processed. The Social Security Fairness Act eliminated two provisions that had long shrunk or wiped out Social Security benefits for…
A marriage that ended decades ago can still be worth money in retirement. Social Security has long allowed someone who was married to a former spouse for at least ten years to collect a benefit based on that person’s earnings record, a rule that surprises many older Americans who assume a divorce decree severed every…
A federal student loan does not disappear because a borrower stops paying it, and for an older borrower who still carries one into retirement, the consequences can reach directly into a Social Security check. Federal law lets the government take up to 15 percent of a Social Security benefit above a protected monthly floor to…
Social Security’s 2027 raise is still two months from being official, but the early math is pointing toward the largest increase beneficiaries have seen since 2023. The Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan advocacy group that tracks inflation data monthly, now projects a 3.6% cost-of-living adjustment for next year. Nothing about that number is locked in,…
Retirement Shield
Free retirement updates
Social Security and Medicare change every year, and nobody sends you a memo. The free Retirement Shield newsletter breaks down what changed and what to do.