AARP<\/a>, lots of folks have no idea just how much money. It did a study and found that about 40% of people 50 and over still don\u2019t have access or haven\u2019t signed up for their Social Security account.<\/p>\n\u201cLook, it is pretty easy. The hardest part is the first time you sign up you have to do some identity verification,\u201d said Bill Sweeney, AARP\u2019s senior vice president of governmental affairs. <\/p>\n
He said it takes less than 10 minutes to sign up. Once you\u2019re in, you can get valuable information like an estimate of your Social Security benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you retire early at 62, you lose 30% of your benefits every month for the rest of your life. If you can wait until you\u2019re 70, you\u2019ll get 77% more for the rest of your life than if you had retired at 62,\u201d Sweeney said.<\/p>\n
For example, you can get an estimate of what your benefits would be at 62, 67 and at 70. In one example, an earner who takes benefits at 64 instead of 65 would lose about $300 a month.<\/p>\n
No matter what you do for a living, deciding how long to work is a very personal decision. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of the toughest decisions that people have to make and most people have to do this based on their own personal circumstances, their medical history, their family history, what they\u2019re dealing with right now,\u201d Sweeney said.<\/p>\n
No matter your age, if you need a reason to pressure Congress to pay attention to the Social Security trust fund, go take a look at how much of your hard-earned money you\u2019ve paid into the Social Security system.<\/p>\n
For Related Stories:<\/strong>\u00a0Social Security<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Consumer Alerts<\/a><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ROCHESTER, N.Y. \u2014 If you\u2019re 50 or older, now is the time to evaluate your lifetime of earnings…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1049727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[15],"tags":[64,263565,255,711,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-1049726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-consumer-alerts","tag-personal-finance","tag-social-security","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117232258462265177","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1049727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}