Staying Fit
One of the most important retirement decisions you and your spouse will make is when to collect Social Security benefits. As of this year, a once-popular way for married couples to make the most of that dual decision is fully off the table.
Social Security used to allow someone who was entitled to both a retirement benefit and a spousal benefit — an auxiliary benefit one partner can receive based on the other’s earnings record — to choose one or the other if they had reached full retirement age (FRA). That way, you could draw a spousal benefit first, then shift to your retirement benefit at age 70, when you became eligible for your maximum payment.
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Congress eliminated that option as part of a 2015 budget law. Lawmakers grandfathered in people who were close to retirement age, allowing “dually entitled” people born before Jan. 2, 1954, to choose between spousal and retirement benefits if they had reached FRA. Everyone else was subject to “deemed filing”: When they claimed Social Security, they were deemed to be filing for both spousal and retirement benefits and would get whichever amount was higher.
As of Jan. 1, 2024, anyone still covered by the old rules had turned 70, rendering the strategy moot and leaving couples with one less tool for maximizing their benefits.
What happened to ‘file and suspend’?
The option to choose between benefit types gave rise to a popular couples’ claiming strategy called “file and suspend,” which Congress also ended in that 2015 act.
With this method, one spouse — typically the higher earner in the house — filed for Social Security at FRA, the age when you can claim 100 percent of the benefit calculated from your earnings history. The other partner would then claim spousal benefits, which can be up to 50 percent of their mate’s full benefit amount.
The first spouse would ask Social Security for a voluntary suspension of benefits, allowing them to accrue delayed retirement credits and boost their future payments. In the meantime, the other continued to get spousal benefits. When each spouse reached 70, they would be able to collect their respective, now-maximized retirement benefits.
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“File and suspend was a great tool to use for maximizing Social Security back in the day,” says Chuck Czajka, a certified Social Security claiming strategist and founder of Macro Money Concepts, a financial services company based in Stuart, Florida.
Clients of his firm who used file and suspend “are doing really well,” Czajka says. Not only do they get bigger combined benefits; because the higher-earning spouse was able to get their maximum retirement benefit, the lower earner gets a bigger survivor benefit if they live longer, he adds.
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