Robin Brewton, who advises clients on Social Security benefit strategies, has boosted retirees’ financial security with a single question: Are you divorced? It is a little-known fact: If you’re divorced, it’s possible to claim Social Security spousal and survivor benefits from your ex. It is a strategy that can dramatically boost your benefits – and [...] [...more]
Americans want to know how to get the most from their Social Security benefits, and they have posed more than 11,000 questions to AARP over the years. The group of more than 37 million people age 50 and older has been collecting these queries – and answers to them – in an online searchable database [...] [...more]
Many workers worry aboutfactoring Social Security into their retirement plans, fearing a massive cut to benefits, but how likely is such an event, and what would it mean for retirees? I talked about these concerns recently with Christine Benz, personal finance director for Morningstar.com. View the video below, or as posted on Morningstar’s site. [...more]
Leah Witherspoon lives on $1,684 a month from Social Security, which is just a little more than the average Social Security retirement benefit this year of $1,261. The 66-year-old Dallas widow, a former school cafeteria supervisor, is a typical Social Security beneficiary in another way: Her benefits provide just enough to get by. But that [...] [...more]
Readers have plenty of questions about Social Security, and I had the opportunity to answer some of them at Morningstar’s Individual Investor Conference last month, alongside one of country’s foremost experts on the program – Mary Beth Franklin, contributing editor at InvestmentNews. Morningstar.com editor Jason Stipp quizzed us about the policy issues and financial projections [...] [...more]
