Social Security Info

Social Security is supposed to provide just part of your retirement money, replacing about 40% of your pre-retirement earnings. That’s not enough to avoid a big decline in quality of life, so you’ll want to build a nest egg to supplement your benefits.

If you’re already in your 60s, it may feel impossible to do that — but you’d be surprised how much you can save if you get serious about it and stay in the workforce a bit longer than planned.

If you’re thinking about working while collecting your benefits, you need to know before you claim them that you may not be able to keep both your paycheck and full Social Security check.

If you’ve already reached full retirement age, this isn’t a concern; you can work as much as you’d like with no effect. But if you’re under FRA, you could forfeit some of your monthly retirement benefit if you earn too much.

Although the Social Security Administration will recalculate your benefits at full retirement age to account for the forfeited funds and give you higher checks later, this doesn’t help if you miss out on entire checks now that you were counting on to supplement your income.