Monday, April 6, 2009

Suspending social security

In an earlier post I commented about a loop hole in FDIC bank account insurance limits that can be exploited to raise the limit. My local paper published a column on Sunday about how you can apply for social security at age 62, collect a reduced benefit for 8 years and then pay it all back (without interest) at age 70 and start collecting the maximum benefit. This appears to be better than just waiting until age 70 to collect the maximum benefit as it hedges against the possibility that you will die between age 62 and 70. See here for more on this and other scenarios for optimizing your social security benefit. Again I think it is dubious public policy to provide options like this whose main benefit appears to be to provide employment for financial planners at the expense of making life more complicated for ordinary people.

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