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: Here are some questions I’ve been receiving a lot:
- Why can’t I get access to my ex spouse’s earnings record? I need this information to do my own Social Security planning.
- Will Social Security notify me if my ex starts collecting his or her Social Security retirement benefit? This decision can, in special cases, affect when I can start my divorcée spousal benefit.
Answer: The Social Security Administration won’t let divorcées have access to their ex spouses’ earnings records. Nor will it let widows and widowers have access to their late spouses’ earnings records.
This policy, which Social Security claims is for privacy purposes, is simply outrageous.
I suspect a darker explanation. Congress, which sets Social Security’s “privacy” rules, remains an old boys club. Keeping ex-wives from getting access to their former husbands’ earnings records keeps ex-wives from demanding higher alimony if their former husbands start earning more money. Of course, this could go both ways, men could demand higher alimony too. But the Social Security Administration does spouses a disservice by not letting them see what their ex or late spouses were earning.
I may be off base about the underlying explanation for these provisions. But what I know for sure is that given Social Security’s benefit formulas, the earnings histories of, say, Mary’s ex-husband, Joe, and Linda’s late husband, Sam, are just as much the private property of Mary and Linda as they are of Joe and Sam.
Mary and Linda have a legal claim to benefits based on their former husbands’ earnings records. But if they can’t get access to these earnings records, they can’t properly plan when to retire, how much to save for retirement, in which order to take their spousal, retirement and survivor benefits, or when to take them at all.
Yes, once Mary and Linda are in spitting distance of being able to collect benefits on their ex or their deceased husbands, which is very late in the day, they can find out from Social Security what these benefits will be. And if they are really knowledgeable about the system, they can roughly infer what their husbands must have made and then run through the potentially thousands of combinations of benefit collection dates to figure out which one is optimal. But this is not something I recommend anyone try on their own.
As for learning whether your ex is collecting benefits, don’t expect Social Security to notify you. First off, the Social Security Administration doesn’t know who is or was married to whom. You need to establish you are or were married by providing a copy of your marriage certificate or your final divorce decree. But to collect divorcée spousal benefits, you need to have been married at least 10 years, have an ex who is at least age 62 and have been divorced for two or more years or have an ex who has filed for his or her retirement benefit. Because of those requirements, knowing whether your ex has filed matters a great deal if you were divorced less than two years ago. But the only way to know if your ex has filed is to ask him or her.
The AARP, which has close to 40 million members, should lobby Congress to make the Social Security Administration provide access to former spouses’ earnings records because it’s the private information of the surviving and ex spouses as much as it is of their former spouses.
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