Our expert weighs in on
how it works, and how much you can expect to receive
by Phil Moeller | June 25, 2019
In this week’s
column, Phil Moeller, the author of Get What’s Yours for Medicare: Maximize Your Coverage, Minimize Your
Costs and co-author of the updated edition of How to Get What’s Yours: The Revised
Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security, answers a reader’s
question about survivor benefits and how they can work with an individual’s own
Social Security benefit.
Got a question of
your own about Medicare or Social Security?
Send it to askphil@considerable.com.
Can I claim a
survivor’s benefit even after I have claimed my own benefit?
Question: Could you please
help me? I will be 65 next January, have been a widow for 20 years, and never
remarried. I want to stop working then and claim my Social Security benefits,
which I project will be about $1,000 a month.
Then, when I reach my
full retirement
age of 66 years and two months, I want to stop my own benefits and
claim my much larger survivor benefit of about $2,200 a month.
Is this possible? I
have called Social Security and can never get the same answer twice!
Susan
Answer: Dear Susan, yes, you
can do this. Social Security rules permit a person to claim their own benefit
without simultaneously triggering a claim for a survivor benefit.
When you do file for
your survivor benefit you will not be technically switching to that benefit but
will be receiving what Social Security calls an excess survivor benefit.
It should be equal to
the amount by which your survivor benefit exceeds the retirement benefit you’ve
already been receiving.
I do not know how
much you earn at your job. But I would suggest you look at Social Security’s earnings test rules and
see if it makes sense for you to file for your own benefit before you stop
working. You’re already eligible for a survivor benefit right now.
Susan: Thank you so much!!
I so appreciate all your time, support, and expertise. Since I first got in
touch, my situation has changed. I now plan to work until my FRA and then claim
my maximum survivor benefit.
However, Social
Security is now telling me I will only get 75% of my late husband’s benefit
because in 1998 he took Social Security for about 5 months. Is this true? I am
financially and emotionally devastated. Do you have any advice for me?
God bless.
Sue
Phil: I wish I had a
surefire solution for you, but I don’t. If it were me, I’d ask Social Security
for a formal document explaining your late husband having taken only 5 months
of benefits in 1998. If that’s all he took, this seems like a very steep cut in
your survivor benefit.
Was this the five
months right before he died, or did he stop benefits for some reason? If he
stopped his benefits, I’d want to know why. Once a person reaches their FRA,
they can suspend benefits and earn delayed retirement
credits until they resume them. If his benefits ended due to his
death, there is no way your benefit would be reduced by more than a few
percent.
There are logical
reasons for Social Security’s many, many rules, but not knowing them can place
people at a huge disadvantage in properly planning for their later years.
I think Congress
should authorize much higher operational funding for the agency to communicate
these rules to the public.
My complaints carry
little if any weight, but administrators of the agency recently
complained about operational funding cuts, and many in Congress
agree.
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