March 02, 2021
How to Plan for Your Social Security? | How to Maximize Your Social Security Over Your Lifetime?
How to plan for Social Security? How to maximize your Social Security over your lifetime?
Join Attorney and Advisor Chris Berry in this episode of Daily Wisdom.
Watch the full webinar here:
Estate Attorney and Advisor Chris Berry of Castle Wealth Group answers questions on retirement and estate planning every Wednesday at 1pm. Register via this link or give our office a call at 844-885-4200.
Castle Wealth Group and Christopher Berry help families with estate planning, elder law, retirement planning, and tax planning from their offices in Brighton, Ann Arbor, Livonia, Bloomfield Hills, and Novi.
Castle Wealth Group helps families with their legal, financial, and tax planning for their retirement and legacy.
With the use of legal structures like revocable living trusts, Castle Trusts (asset protection trusts), Chris Berry and Castle Wealth Group can help your family plan, protect, and preserve what is important through their Retirement and Legacy Blueprint Process.
For more info visit:
https://castlewealthlegal.com/home
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Episode Transcript
How Should We Plan For Social Security?
And really the answer for everyone is different. And the idea is that really with social security, you can claim it anytime from 62 or actually 60 if you’re a widow, up until age 70, and you’re going to have what’s called full retirement age. Full retirement age, depending on when you’re born is either going to be 66 or 67. And especially with married couples, there’s a lot of different variables in terms of how to maximize social security. And one of the things that we can do is run what we call a social security timing report. Where if we get a copy of your social security statement, we can go ahead and especially with a married couple, run a social security timing report, figure out what is the way to maximize social security for you over your lifetime.
Best Time To Take Social Security
And so we have to factor in, when do we think we would pass away? Maybe it’s like 85, maybe it’s 75, maybe it’s 95. And then based on that, we can look at does it make sense to delay taking social security or does it make sense to take social security earlier? And it really is different for everyone. For example, just last week, let’s say I have a hypothetical client. One client is on disability and in poor health and the wife is healthy, considering whether to retire prior to 66 or 67. So in their situation, because the husband had a higher social security and wasn’t super healthy, based on conversations, it made sense for her to retire prior to full retirement age, understanding that she’s going to get less of a social security. But when the husband passes away, she’s going to get bumped up to his social security. So in that situation, it made sense for her to take social security earlier, because if he passes, she’s going to get bumped up to his social security anyways.
Tax Planning Concept
Now you compare that, there’s a lot of situations where it makes sense to delay taking social security. Because every year you wait after basically full retirement age, social security grows at about roughly 8% per year. So your income for the rest of your life can grow at roughly 8% a year the longer you delay taking social security up to age 70. And then what happens is that if you do delay taking social security, that fits into a nice tax planning concept of if you do retire and then you delay taking social security, then you can pull money from your IRAs when you’re at a lower income tax bracket. So it kind of fits nicely into a tax planning scenario as well.
So just when is the best time to take social security? Unfortunately, it really depends, but that’s something that we can sit down and figure out in your situation when is the best time to take it. Sometimes it makes sense to take social security as soon as possible. Sometimes it makes sense to delay taking social security. It just fits into having some type of plan for income.