Laurence Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University who has been answering questions and writing columns about Social Security each week for the past two years on PBS NEWSHOUR’s website. OpenRetirement has asked Professor Kotlikoff to post a Q&A each day from those columns. He has also developed software, called Maximize My Social Security, to help retirees secure the highest lifetime Social Security benefits. You can find the software here: www.maximizemysocialsecurity.com
Question: My life partner and I are both 66 and drawing full retirement of around $2,000 each per month. Is there any reason to marry?
Answer: You need to be married for one year, after which both of you will be eligible for spousal benefits based on the other’s work record. Since you both started your benefits within the last year, you still have time to repay what you received (including any Medicare Part B premiums paid on your behalf) and do a Social Security “do over,” enabling you to benefit from filing as a married couple. (Read “When Life Partners Should Marry to Benefit from Social Security.”)
A “do over” entails one of you — the higher earner — filing for his or her retirement benefit and suspending its collection, while having the other person file just for his or her full spousal benefit. Then, when you both reach age 70, you’d both collect your retirement benefits at a 32 percent permanently higher inflation-adjusted value. This will give one of you what amounts to free spousal benefits for about two-and-a-half years.
Getting married will, after nine months, also entitle each of you to collect survivor benefits based on the other person’s work history. If you do the Social Security “do over,” the survivor benefit will be based on the actual retirement benefit the deceased was collecting or would have collected had he or she begun collecting a retirement benefit at the time of death. So, for example, waiting until age 70 to collect will raise the survivor benefits of both spouses. However, if one is taking a retirement benefit at the same time one takes a survivor benefit, one only gets the larger of the two benefits. In other words, if the higher earner dies first, the remaining spouse’s survivor benefits will be higher.
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