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.
A Social Security Administration audit released Sept. 23, 2026 traced $1 billion in improper Supplemental Security Income payments to a single point of failure: earnings alerts that sat unresolved instead of being checked against what recipients were actually earning. The same audit found that failure is still active. As of the report, 417,291 SSI recipients…
Divorce ends a marriage on paper, but under Social Security Administration rules it does not automatically end a former spouse’s access to a worker’s earnings record. A person who was married at least a decade, and who has since stayed unmarried, can qualify for a benefit calculated from an ex-spouse’s work history, paid from the…
Age 62 is the earliest a worker can claim a Social Security retirement benefit, and for anyone born in 1960 or later, it is also the age that locks in the deepest possible cut to that benefit. Full retirement age for that entire birth cohort is 67, a full five years past the earliest claiming…
October’s Social Security payments do not all arrive on the same day, and the date a beneficiary should expect depends on nothing more complicated than a birthday. Most people who receive a retirement, survivor or disability benefit will see their deposit land on one of three Wednesdays this month, split by the day of the…
Widows and widowers deciding when to claim a deceased spouse’s Social Security benefit are choosing a percentage, not just a date. Social Security’s survivor rules set the earliest claiming age at 60, and the size of the check locks in at whatever percentage corresponds to the age it starts. The gap between claiming at the…
A Social Security overpayment notice does not just ask for money back — it tells the agency how much of next month’s check it is entitled to keep while it collects. Under current Social Security Administration policy, that default is steep: half of a monthly retirement or disability benefit, taken automatically, without a payment plan…
A Fort Washington, Maryland, man was sentenced on September 1, 2026, to eight months in federal prison for collecting more than $270,000 in Social Security disability benefits while running two cleaning companies he concealed from the agency. U.S. District Judge Lydia K. Griggsby also ordered three years of supervised release for Andrew Langford, 50, who…
The Social Security Administration never paid more than 1.1 million Supplemental Security Income underpayments, worth about $291 million, that were owed to eligible recipients or their survivors, according to an audit announced September 3 by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General. In a sample of pending cases, auditors found that employees had skipped required…
Nearly half of the Social Security overpayment notices examined by federal auditors failed to meet the agency’s own policy requirements, according to an audit released Sept. 4 by the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General. Of 126 overpayments reviewed from fiscal year 2023, 58, or 46%, came with notices that were missing required…
The Social Security Administration paid $40,474 in Supplemental Security Income to eight recipients whose extra vehicles pushed their countable resources over the program’s limit, according to an audit released September 15, 2026, by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General. The inspector general’s review of 208 SSI recipients found that more than a quarter of…