Raising your Social Security Benefit Dues as much as you Can
There are all kinds of ways that the Social Security benefit package you receive can be improved upon. Most ways are legal; and some are illegal. The Social Security Administration merely found one of the illegal ways out recently and put an end to it. What people would do was, they would start by claiming their benefits when they were, say, 60. They collected their benefits for a couple of years, but didn’t spend it. They stashed it away, collected interest, and lived on their own means. A few years afterward, they repaid the SSA everything they had been paid (minus the interest they personally made on that money), and then case closed,they applied for benefits all over again. The Social Security rules say that if you delay claiming benefits, you get more. When you repay everything you get from the SSA, they consider you as having never applied for Social Security at all. So when you apply again subsequently having repaid everything, their computers think that you’re applying for the first time. Doing it this way, they got to get their early retirement benefits and also their late retirement benefits. They could have their cake and eat it as well.
This particular maneuver cost the SSA approximately $10 billion a year, even if few people had the resourcefulness to pull a fast one like this. Under the new rules, you can still do this whole thing; but whatever repaying and refilling you may have in mind you need to get done within 12 months of first applying for your Social Security benefit payments. And now, you can only do it once. No more free loans from the Social Security Administration. If you’re seeking a legal way to raise your Social Security pay, here are your choices.
Once the most popular ways to go about maximizing your Social Security benefit package is to coordinate spousal benefits.
If in a couple, the wife has a high-paying job while the husband has the average paying job, the wife can apply to collect on her husband from the time he is 66 until he reaches 70. Her own benefits meanwhile, earn delayed credits. For this to work, the spouse with the lower salary needs to apply for their own benefits (if they are of retirement age); the higher-earning spouse can’t do this before they are full retirement age; and finally, when the higher-earning spouse goes to their SSA office, they must tell the administrators there that they wish to restrict their application to spousal benefits.
Among the great sides to the Social Security act is that if one spouse should pass away, and if they were the one who made a larger Social Security benefit package, the surviving spouse who has the lower benefits level can apply to have their benefits bumped up to the level of the one who died. The best way to make the most of this would be to have the higher-earning spouse delay their benefits until they are seventy. They will have the biggest Social Security payments then. It doesn’t matter if that person does not live long after that. The surviving spouse will stand to make so much more.
