WSJ article today lists 3 reasons why people don’t, and perhaps shouldn’t wait until 70 to claim Social Security. Not all of them ring true (with me) but a couple do.
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I went on Social Security at 65.
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I bailed on WeCo/LU at 62, all my supervisors, managers had already bailed or were forced out, the idea of training the new management to my satisfaction just wasn’t going to be fun, likely would have ended up having to work well out of my home area, so out of a suitcase for years, if I stuck around, so it was time to pack it in, they made an "offer’, I guessed it was likely the last, so grabbed it, took nearly the next year to settle it and sort out all the bits n pieces of the Bell System share spinoffs, merges, consolidate what seemed safe, but it worked out OK.. DW worked a bit longer, held on until 66, I think.. We took a cut, going at 62, but there are no guarantees of survival until 70… It was time…
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Interesting. They suggest that delaying could subject you to sequence risk if you were forced to spend down accumulated assets in the heart of a severe market downturn early in retirement. Most of us here were thinking the exact opposite because we would also be locking in higher lifetime guaranteed inflation adjusted income by delaying to 70.
I was looking at it from a third perspective. Because the market had already dropped about 20% in the summer of 2022 when I reached FRA, and since we were living on pensions, SS and dividend income, i thought it was a good time to take early and dollar cost average my SS checks into my ETFs to take advantage of the downturn. The jury is still out on that one. My early returns from September 2022 till now are good and participating in this crazy rally, but my latest checks are going into treasuries and money markets earning less than 8%. This rally is so big I don’t trust it.
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My wife and I took our SS at 62 and haven’t looked back. For us, it was one of the best financial decisions we ever made.
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Ask 100 people and you’ll get 100 different right answers.
Ms. Wolf, retired several years before me. So she collected her SS and I received 50% of her SS while I continued to work. All the SS, net of taxes, went into retirement savings as we lived off my wages.
When I retired 69, having the higher wages, we flipped it. I received my SS and she receives 50% of my SS.
One of my bigger regrets is not retiring earlier. We are both in good health (knock on wood). I was way too conservative with my retirement budget. I’m still pushing Ms. Wolf on an African safari trip while we can.
Trivia question: What African animal kills the most humans?
Mosquito, and in a distance 2nd place, the hippopotamus.
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Most of the lifelong savers I know realize in hindsight that they could have retired earlier.
I think it is a survival instinct of some sort. Our amygdala, our alligator brain, gives fear of failure an outsized role in our decision making causing us to retire only when our nest egg gives us a large margin of error.
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I think ss is on the dc chopping block.
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Good to hear. This is my current counter plan to what the media has told us for years. Been crunching the numbers, and with one open heart surgery in the books, I need to get outta the rat race and do stuff for me.
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