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The Spouse receives the Full Benefit if they are at full retirement age. Meaning they get the full amount the higher earning spouse was receiving.
For the benefit of others that might read this in the future and not have carefully followed preceding discussions, note that this applies to survivor benefit but not to spousal retirement benefit.
The Spouse receives the Full Benefit if they are at full retirement age. Meaning they get the full amount the higher earning spouse was receiving.
Its a sliding scale if they are under age 66. The social security website should show it to you.
Keep in mind full retirement age has increased from 66 to 67.
COLAs are an unknown. There is no right answer. Right now, I use 3%.
Prior to the past 3 years, the yearly average was less then 2% for the 2000s.
Thanks for that and the table you provided. It's been a bit since I did the computations I wanted to do, but I think I played around with both 2 and 3 percent.
If neither spouse is working, Usually, taking it as early as possible makes the most sense. Especially with a large age gap.
You have to consider lost opportunity cost of waiting. That is money that could be working for you earning money each year, and its going to end anyway eventually and step-up to the higher amount. So we are talking a shorter time frame vs. all of retirement (for the younger spouse).
Take the money and run in that scenario. jmo from a general perspective.
If neither spouse is working, it might be that the money would be necessary for living rather than saving.
(Assuming both spouses are still living and the older spouse's record will provide a higher survivor benefit than the younger spouse's retirement benefit) For the younger spouse, the degree of age difference and when step up to the higher amount will occur are the questions. That involves some depressing date of death guesses.
I was able to get PIA's (primary insurance amounts) using a calculator on the SS website.
I found a free breakeven calculator that I used to do some breakeven review. Even with calculations that would be open to some question, the overall result seemed to support your "from the hip" idea that taking the early benefit would be appropriate.
If the younger spouse is still working and is below FRA, earnings offsets become an issue. In trying to understand earnings offsets and how earnings data would be reported and the adjustment computations would be made, I stumbled on to a number of horror stories of SSA clawbacks of miscomputed benefit payments. With that information, I am totally dropping any consideration of filing for benefits while younger spouse is working.