I know this is OT but I couldn’t find a more relavant forum that wasn’t long term dead and this is exactly the kind of thing I’ll bet somebody here has a ready and credible answer to since SS is recurring topic.
If you want to dump it, that’s OK too. Just thought I’d give it a try
Inputs:
work life -35 yrs
wages – on or about median, majority of that time
Claim Soc Seurity – Full retirement age
Is there a calculator that can show me what that person’s SS payout be at if they were claiming it soon? Seems to me the wages part would be hard to do because I have no idea what median salary/wages were at each point the past 35 yrs.
Thanks. Went there first. There was a rough-cut calculator with $56,000ish already showing as “current salary.” That sounds like current median wage, so OK there. But is it assuming the person in question has worked at the historical median wage the whole time? It doesn’t actually say. Seems like a good assumption but, ya know, that ss out of you and me thing.
It already has the information of your SS wages, and SS taxes paid, and it is factored. You can provide future salary, Often, your last annual salary is populated there. You can play with that to see how it impacts.
Like that '60’s song said: It ain’t meeebabe" I already got mine. I am trying to investigate a theoretical wage earner. An average or median Ralph Kramden, Chester Riley just getting through an average life in an average way. What’s waiting for him at the end of his rainbow vis a vis Social Security? I’m also using this to elucidate some relatives who are always crying about money.
Many years ago they stopped. I think when they came up with ssa.gov and you open your own account. Like someone said above, they already have all your numbers so it’s easy to look up. But here I am not interested in my own stuff. I went on SS a few months after the heart attack back in 2020.
PS: That roughcut calculator I mentioned earlier was not at ssa.gov. It was some private sector financial site.
Also, be aware that Social Security is taxable on a sliding scale. The amount of your Social Security benefits that may be subject to federal income tax depends on your “combined income,” which includes your adjusted gross income (AGI), nontaxable interest, and half of your Social Security benefits. (This is before the standard deduction is subtracted.)
The only TaxAide clients I see who actually get to keep all their Social Security have little or no additional income.
Wendy
For Single, Head of Household, or Qualifying Surviving Spouse:
Please don;t make me go back and try to find it.. Ha ha
It was a page at ssa.guv explaining how they calculate your payout. It was too complicated and dense quite frankly but my take-away was relevant to that private sector site I found. (smartasset.com…?) The $56,000 figure that was defaulted in “current wage” was in fact the “average” I was looking for or close enough. I might still be off but without doing a lot of look-back research and then finding a calculator to work with I’ll settle for what I’ve found.
It also shows the path to “saving” Social Security without increasing taxes from the wealthy. Just tax it all away. Currently, 50% is tax-exempt. It would be easy to change that to 0% tax-exempt with no fanfare.
Wendy
In spite of his $30M paydays, I would expect Jamie Dimon to claim SS benefits. Must not “burden” him with paying tax on that relative, to him, dribble of money.
I still like “Plan Steve”: impose a work requirement on all able bodied people, regardless of age, to receive Medicare benefits, and only pay SS benefits to the “disabled”. Then the (L&Ses) can pat themselves on the back for “saving SS and Medicare for the truly needy” by forcing all the able bodied Proles, regardless of age, back into the workforce.
It’s one thing to cut Medicaid since the poor vote in low numbers. It’s quite another to cut Social Security and Medicare which benefit the highest voting bloc in the country – the elderly.
There is a midterm election in November 2026. Would be hard to win without any town hall meetings. Which would be pretty nasty if Plan Steve was on the table.
Wendy
After forty years of propaganda about how SS is doomed, a lot of people would shrug and accept it. When I was still working, there were a number of coworkers, ten or fifteen years younger than me, who were convinced they would never collect a nickle. There are probably a lot more, who have not saved anything to supplement SS, and, thus, expect to work until they drop. Even our cohort saw an SS cut, when “full retirement age” was changed from the original 65.
Born 1937 or earlier: Full retirement age is 65. Born 1943 - 1954: Full retirement age is 66. Born 1955 - 1959: Full retirement age gradually increases, reaching 67 for those born in 1960 or later. Born 1960 and later: Full retirement age is 67
Lots of other little adjustments, like everyone who is already on SS keeps it. Only those who have not yet claimed it, are subject to the work requirement.
There is the recent addition to “Plan Steve”: extreme requirements for proof of citizenship. That one has an excellent chance of getting past the old phartz in the base, until they read the fine print. (you can only be a citizen if you can prove your parents were citizens, and they can only be citizens by birth if their parents were citizens…repeat until a lot of people are excluded.)
Only those that don’t depend on it. A 25% cut would cause millions of elderly to go broke in a month or less. Millions of them live paycheck to paycheck.
That is the brilliance of “Plan Steve”: the able bodied will be forced back into the workforce, but the “truly needy” those too broken up and feeble to work still receive SS. I doubt any of the “greeters” I see at the grocery store I shop are under 70.
ss out of you and me thing.