Oct 3, 2024
Social Security claiming rules can be complicated, especially if you are married. It's smart to be strategic about when each spouse claims benefits to maximize your combined lifetime income. This is especially true if there's a big age gap between the spouses, as chances are good that one spouse may outlive the other by many years and may need Social Security for support.
If you're much older than your wife and she's thinking about claiming Social Security early, here's what you need to know about how this choice could impact the checks she'll receive.
The older spouse can delay their claim to increase survivor benefits
If you are already 73, you likely started your Social Security checks years ago as there's no benefit to delaying your claim beyond the age of 70. While it's too late to go back and change the claiming choice you made, hopefully you waited until 70 to begin getting benefits.
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If one spouse earns much more than the other, it's smart for them to delay their benefits claim as long as possible until 70. The same is true if one spouse is much older than the other and likely to outlive them. There's a simple reason for that.
When you delay your own benefits claim, you increase the survivor benefits available to your partner. You do this because you avoid early filing penalties and earn delayed retirement credits that increase your monthly checks — and survivor benefits equal the amount you were receiving when you passed.
Increasing your benefits as much as you can will leave your partner with more money to live on after you're gone.
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The younger spouse can make strategic choices about when to claim benefits
Regardless of what choices you made with your benefits, your spouse is facing some complex choices about claiming her own checks. That's because there are three different kinds of potential benefits she may be eligible for:
- Her own retirement benefits: If she worked long enough, she can claim retirement benefits on her own work record. These will be reduced if she claims before her full retirement age, or she can increase them by waiting until 70 to claim them.
- Spousal benefits: These are benefits available to her based on your work record. She can claim them as young as 62, although if she claims before her full retirement age, the amount she gets will be reduced. They can equal as much as 50% of your full retirement benefit if claimed at FRA, but they can't be increased if she waits until 70 to claim.
- Survivor benefits: Your wife can claim these starting at age 60, or age 50 if disabled. They can equal up to the amount you were receiving at the time of your death, or your standard benefit if you hadn't yet claimed Social Security when you died. However, if your spouse claims them early, they will be reduced. They don't increase if she waits until 70.
Now, here's where things get tricky. When your wife files for benefits, deemed filing rules mean she can't choose between her own retirement benefits and her spousal benefits. She's deemed to have filed for both if she requests either, and she'll get the larger of the two amounts. If she's applied before FRA, whichever one she gets will be reduced.
What she can do, though, is file for her retirement or spousal benefits and then switch to survivor benefits -- or vice versa.
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In other words, she could:
- Start her retirement or spousal benefits
- Keep receiving them until her full retirement age for survivor benefits (which is different from her FRA for retirement/spousal benefits)
- Claim survivor benefits at that time if you've already passed away or keep getting her own benefits until you die, then switch over to survivor benefits.
If survivor benefits are likely to be higher than her own benefits, this strategy makes sense. She can live on her benefits until she becomes eligible for the maximum survivor benefit.
Alternatively, she could:
- Wait to file for her own benefits
- Start collecting survivor benefits when you pass
- Keep collecting survivor benefits until age 70 when she's maxed out her retirement benefits and can switch over to them.
This approach makes sense if her retirement checks will be higher than survivor benefits — and if you can get by without her benefits. This also makes the most sense if you're likely to pass away sooner rather than later as she'll have her survivor benefits to live on then.
As you can see, there's a lot of complexity that goes into this choice, so talking with a financial adviser may be a smart move to maximize
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Christy Bieber has 15 years of experience as a personal finance and legal writer. She has written for many publications including Forbes, Kilplinger, CNN, WSJ, Credit Karma, Insurify and more.
