How Much Social Security Will I Get?

How much Social Security will you actually get? The SSA gives you a number inside your my Social Security account, but read the disclaimer right under it. It says, in plain English, we assume your earnings will continue at the same level until your retirement age, and if they are different your benefit will not match the estimate. Watch the intro at 0:52. If you plan to retire early, drop to part-time, take a sabbatical, or close out your career with a big salary jump, the SSA estimate is built on the wrong income assumption. Knowing how to redo the math yourself takes about twenty minutes and gives you the real number under any scenario.

Open Excel, Google Sheets, or just a paper notepad. You need six columns across the top: Year, Age, Actual Earnings, Indexing Factor, Indexed Earnings, and Highest 35 Years. Watch the setup at 2:55. Putting Year and Age side by side feels redundant, but you will thank yourself in Step 4 when you have to look up an age-specific indexing factor for every row. Leave plenty of room. If you started working at 18 and you are 65 now, that is 47 rows to fill in.

Log into your my Social Security account at ssa.gov/myaccount and click View Earnings Record. Watch the walkthrough at 3:40. You want the column labeled Taxed Social Security Earnings, not Taxed Medicare Earnings. Copy each year into your spreadsheet. Do not skip any years, even the zero years - missed years count as zeros in the average, and the formula uses your highest 35, so missing years matter. If you do not have an online account yet, set one up at the same URL. It takes about ten minutes and a couple of identity-verification questions.

SSA adjusts your old earnings for wage inflation, but only through the year you turn 60. Anything you earned at 60 or later goes in at face value. Visit the indexing factors page at ssa.gov/oact/cola/awifactors.html. Watch this part at 4:50. At the bottom of that page, enter the year you turn (or turned) 62. The SSA spits back a list of factors, one per year. Multiply each year's Actual Earnings by its Indexing Factor and write the result in the Indexed Earnings column. Years where the factor is 1.0 (age 60 onward) come across unchanged.

Sort your Indexed Earnings column from largest to smallest and copy the top 35 values into the Highest 35 Years column. Watch the wrap-up at 6:20. If you do not have 35 working years, the missing slots count as zeros and they drag your average down hard, so plan to keep working if you can. Add up all 35 numbers, then divide by 420 (the number of months in 35 years). The result is your Average Indexed Monthly Earnings, your AIME. Devin's example AIME comes out to $5,726, but yours will be different. This is the hardest step in the whole process. The next two are quick.

This is where your AIME becomes a benefit amount. The formula has three tiers and two bend points. For the 2019 bend points Devin uses in the example ($926 and $5,583): the first $926 of AIME counts at 90 percent, the chunk from $927 to $5,583 counts at 32 percent, and anything above $5,583 counts at 15 percent. Watch the worked example at 8:00. Run his $5,726 AIME through it: $926 x 90% = $833, $4,657 x 32% = $1,490, $143 x 15% = $21. Sum those and you get a Primary Insurance Amount (PIA) of about $2,344 per month. That is your Full Retirement Age benefit. You have to use the bend points for the year you turn 62 - they update every January, and the current numbers live at ssa.gov/oact/cola/bendpoints.html.

The bend points in Step 6 are the ones for the year you turn 62. If 62 is still a few years out, you have to estimate where the bend points will be by then. Watch the projection at 9:20. Devin built a free bend-point calculator at socialsecurityintelligence.com/bend-point-calculator. Enter your year of birth, the current year's first and second bend points (pull them from the SSA page), and an inflation assumption. The SSA Trustees expect about 4 percent average wage growth per year; pick 2, 3, or 4 percent based on how conservative you want to be. The calculator returns the projected bend points for your eligibility year, and you plug those into the formula in Step 6 the same way.

Your PIA is the benefit you get at your Full Retirement Age (66 to 67 depending on birth year). If you file earlier, the SSA cuts your check. If you file later, they grow it. Watch the breakdown at 11:30. File any time after FRA and your benefit grows 8 percent per year, up to age 70 (about 0.667% per month of delay). File in the 36-month window right before FRA and your benefit drops about 6.67% per year (0.556% per month). File more than 36 months before FRA - so age 62 for most people - and the cut accelerates to 5% per year on top of the 6.67%. The difference between filing at 62 and 70 is roughly 77% more income for life if you wait. Plug a few filing ages into your spreadsheet and see what each one is worth.