This book will guide you through the seven key steps to help you determine if early retirement makes sense for you. The first step to answering your $100,000 Question is to learn exactly what your Social Security benefits will be. Next, you will learn about the penalties for early retirement, and the financial risks of making the wrong early retirement decision. In this chapter, you will learn the options and their cost to you.
Your Social Security Statement
In 1999 the SSA began mailing Social Security statements annually to all adults 25 and over about three months prior to their birthdays. In the statement, you receive an estimate of your benefits under the most current laws, and a record of your earnings upon which your benefits are based. If you do not have this statement, you need to get one. Call 800-772-1213 or go to www.ssa.gov and request a statement order form. Because this is sensitive personal information, it is not available online. You have to mail a form to the SSA and wait for a response in four to six weeks.
Your Social Security statement estimates what your benefits will be based on current law and your history of earnings. As you get closer to retirement age the estimate of your benefits are more accurate, as your earning record is more complete and the laws are less apt to change. Check your earnings history to make sure it agrees with your records. The SSA estimates that employers submit incorrect information 4 percent of the time and it tries to correct most of the errors, but it estimates that 1 percent of wages fail to be credited to the correct worker's record. Nancy actually found an error several years ago. Those mistakes can cost you thousands. The most common mistakes occur because the SSA computer does not recognize your family name. Problems occur with hyphenated names, names with spaces, such as Oscar de la Hoya, and Asian and Spanish names in which the primary family name does not come at the end, such as Ho Zheng Fuhu and José López Portillo Alvarez.
In order to qualify for retirement benefits, you must have paid into the system and earned a minimum forty quarterly "work credits" or approximately ten years of work. You must earn at least $920 in a quarter, or $3,680 for the year [2005], to accumulate four annual credits. This amount is indexed upward each year for inflation. Spouses and dependents who are entitled to receive benefits based on your record of earnings credits do not have an earnings requirement themselves.
How do you calculate your benefits? Follow me through this three-step process. First, we will adjust earnings for inflation, then determine lifetime average earnings, and finally calculate benefits based on your average earnings.
First, let's find out your lifetime earnings adjusted for inflation. Each year of your earnings is adjusted forward based on real wage growth inflation to the Base Year that you turn 60. The inflation rate of wages is considerably more than what we commonly think as inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers computed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CPI measures inflation as experienced by consumers in their day-to-day living expenses. Fortunately for all of us, using the larger wage inflation factor creates a larger initial benefit the first year and therefore creates a larger stream of benefits thereafter with the larger initial base.
After you begin receiving benefits they are adjusted annually for inflation by using the lower CPI measure. In 2005 there was a 2.7 percent increase in benefits, the highest being 14.3 percent in 1980 a, and the lowest 1.3 percent in 1999.
