Question: Why can’t a spouse cancel spousal benefits after his wife suspends her retirement benefit? I decided to wait until I retired and was told my husband could cancel his spousal benefits. When he tried, he was told he could not do this. Is that true?
Answer: You can withdraw a spousal benefit (i.e., tell Social Security not to send you the money), but you can’t suspend it and start it up later at a higher value. In other words, once you take a spousal benefit, there is no advantage to stopping the checks. As to why we’re allowed to suspend our retirement benefit (only between full retirement age and age 70) and restart it again before or at age 70, but we aren’t allowed to do the same with spousal or survivor benefits, I don’t know.
Social Security’s opaque, intricate, irritating, insulting and indecipherable rules were, it appears, made up over the years to ensure that no one would possibly be able to understand what they could and couldn’t get back from the system. No matter how well intentioned, this is social engineering at its worst.
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