Motley fool says you can make $15,978 more per year with Social Security. Is this for real?
The purpose of this spammy Motley Fool video ad is to sell their paid newsletter products.  Although the beginning of the video promises to tell you this secret trick for obtaining additional Social Security payments, it fails to do so.  (Luckily, I found a transcript of the video, so I didn't have to watch it.) What they are talking about is the Social Security File and Suspend strategy.  Under this strategy, one spouse files for social security benefits early (say age 66).  This allows the other spouse to claim spousal benefits.  Immediately after that is claimed, the first spouse suspends his social security benefits, allowing them to grow until age 70, but the other spouse is allowed to continue to receive spousal benefits.   Congress has ended this loophole, and it will no longer be available after May 1, 2016.
"Both are saying essentially the same thing.  The Forbes articles says ""as much as 20% [...] up to a maximum of $50,000"".  This means the same as what the IRS page when it says the lesser of a percentage of your income or a total of $53,000.  In other words, the $53k is a cap: you can contribute a percentage of your earnings, but you can never contribute more than $53k, even if you make so much money that 20% of your earnings would be more than that. (The difference between 20% and 25% in the two sources appears to reflect a difference in contribution limits depending on whether you are making contributions for employees, or for yourself as a self-employed individual; see Publication 560.  The difference between $50k and $53k is due to the two pages being written in different years; the limits increase each year.)" Interesting. The answer can be as convoluted/complex as one wishes to make it, or back-of-envelope.  My claim is that if one starts at 21, and deposits 10% of their income each year, they will likely hit a good retirement nest egg. At an 8% return each year (Keep in mind, the last 40 years produced 10%, even with the lost decade) the 10% saver has just over 15X their final income as a retirement account. At 4% withdrawal, this replaces 60% of their income, with social security the rest, to get to nearly 100% or so replacement. Note - I wrote an article about Social Security Benefits, showing the benefit as a percent of final income. At $50K it's 42%, it's a higher replacement rate for lower income, but the replacement rate drops as income rises. So, the $5000 question. For an individual earning $50K or less, this amount is enough to fund their retirement. For those earning more, it will be one of the components, but not the full savings needed.  (By the way, a single person has a standard deduction and exemption totaling $10150 in 2014. I refer to this as the 'zero bracket.' The next $8800 is taxed at 10%. Why go 100% Roth and miss the opportunity to fund these low or no tax withdrawals?) In 1970, lots of people supported one senior on Social Security.   Now, comparatively few people support that one senior.  In the future, demographic projections say we're going to get to the point where there's more than one senior on Social Security per working taxpayer.  This is expected to be a Problem, since it's a lot easier for a government to pay for one $5k Social Security check on five peoples' $3k tax payment than it is for them to pay for one $5k SS check on three peoples' $3k tax payment, and everyone's scratching their head wondering how they're going to pay for one $5k SS check on one person's $3k tax payment.  (These numbers are of course made up, intended more as an illustration of the issue than an accurate summary of the numbers involved.) So a interesting note is that this doesn't seem to take into account cost of living arbitrage OR investments. The reason it's so good to make that money isn't so you can spend it on sports cars and cheap (read: expensive) women. If you invest you can put away like 50k/year, which will probably net you at least 5% return per year (more if you're risky) . So you make 100k for like 5 years, put away 250k and get like 20k from doing nothing. Why don't you go complain about SS? That is far more of a ponzi scheme than the Fed. And the difference is, the government HAS an actual way to generate income. Last I checked, ponzi schemes were developed because there was a severe lack of incoming cash flow. My employer matches 1 to 1 up to 6% of pay. They also toss in 3, 4 or 5 percent of your annual salary depending on your age and years of service. The self-directed brokerage account option costs $20 per quarter. That account only allows buying and selling of stock, no short sales and no options. The commissions are $12.99 per trade, plus $0.01 per share over 1000 shares. I feel that's a little high for what I'm getting. I'm considering 401k loans to invest more profitably outside of the 401k, specifically using options. Contrary to what others have said, I feel that limited options trading (the sale cash secured puts and spreads) can be much safer than buying and selling of stock. I have inquired about options trading in this account, since the trustee's system shows options right on the menus, but they are all disabled. I was told that the employer decided against enabling options trading due to the perceived risks. As Dilip commented, the Social Security web site is pretty comprehensive.  Understanding Supplemental Security Income SSI Income has the details you are looking for.  It's a convoluted equation. You lose SSI at a pretty fast rate as earned income rises. The system is not kind to those who qualify for SSI but try to earn some money to cover their needs. I am in the process of writing an article about how to maximize one's Social Security benefits, or at least, how to start the analysis.   This chart, from my friends at the Social Security office shows the advantage of waiting to take your benefit. In your case, you are getting $1525 at age 62.  Now, if you wait 4 years, the benefit jumps to $2033 or $508/mo more. You would get no benefit for 4 years and draw down savings by $73,200, but would get $6,096/yr more from 64 on. Put it off until 70, and you'd have $2684/mo.  At some point, your husband should apply for a spousal benefit (age 66 for him is what I suggest) and collect that for 4 years before moving to his own benefit if it's higher than that.  Keep in mind, your generous pensions are likely to push you into having your social security benefit taxed, and my plan, above will give you time to draw down the 401(k) to help avoid or at least reduce this. Yeah. CEOs that make $1/year aren't doing it as a labor of love. It's because they'd exceed a threshold (I think it's around $75k salary) that makes their capital gains taxes jump.  If they have a significant amount of money invested it costs them far more in taxes than their salary would otherwise be worth. "The same author wrote in that article “they have a trillion? Really?” But that’s what happens when ten   million dollars compounds at 2% over 200 years. Really? 2% compounded over 200 years produces a return of 52.5X, multiply that by 10M and you have $525 million. The author is off by a factor of nearly 2000 fold. Let's skip this minor math error.  The article is not about 401(k)s. His next line is ""The whole myth of savings is gone."" And the article itself, ""10 Reasons You Have To Quit Your Job In 2014"" is really a manifesto about why working for the man is not the way to succeed long term. And in that regard, he certainly makes good points. I've read this author over the years, and respect his views. 9 of the 10 points he lists are clear and valuable. This one point is a bit ambiguous and falls into the overgeneraluzation ""Our 401(k) have failed us."" But keep in mind, even the self employed need to save, and in fact, have similar options to those working for others. I have a Solo 401(k) for my self employment income.  To be clear, there are good 401(k) accounts and bad. The 401(k) with fees above 1%/yr, and no matching, awful. The 401(k) I have from my job before I retired has an S&P index with .02%/yr cost. (That's $200/$million invested per year.) The 401(k) is not dead." &gt; Smith earned $15 million in total compensation in 2016, including a $1.5-million base salary and $7.3 million in stock awards, according to the company’s securities filings.  &gt; As of Dec. 31, his pension was valued at $18.4 million, the filings showed. Smith is entitled to that pension “under any circumstances,” Gutzmer said. There is one way to make money quickly. If you are married and both are over 50 and you can put money into a deductible IRA for 2014. The $5,500 contribution  and $1,000 catch-up per person would allow the family to make a contribution of $13,000. If they are in the 25% tax bracket the $3,250 drop in their taxes would allow them to get a $325 bonus from their tax software.  Of course they would have already had to be getting a refund before the IRA contribution, or the new refund and bonus would be smaller. They would have had to meet all the program rules. And they must have a combination of 401Ks and AGI to allow deductible contributions.  This would drastically shorten the initial loan period. "You'd need to test the assumptions here - in effect you're saying that in 15 years your account will have a balance 10x your income. But normally you'd expect your income to grow over the years (e.g. promotions) and so you'd hope that your income in 15 years would be significantly larger than what it is now.   But, even in the case where your account eventually does grow to 10x your salary at that time, it may still be worth continuing to contribute. In effect, adding a further 1% to your account is boosting the ""compounding return"" on your account by 1% - after fees and risk free. This additional 1% ""return"" in effect makes your retirement plan safer - you either get a higher total return for the same investment mix, or you can get the same total return for a slightly safer investment mix. In effect, you're treating your salary as a ""safe"" annuity and each year putting 10% of the ""return"" from that into your more risky retirement account." "LOL!!! Once elderly can live off social security alone, we can then talk about ""Universal basic income"".  Just a reminder: Social Security was originally tax free and reasonable. Today, it's taxed, it varies depending on the age you claim it, it's gone if you have too much income, does not increase according to inflation, and this year they removed the ""claim and suspend"" option.  P/S: by the time I retire, I doubt I will get anything form SS... so I don't even count on SS when saving for retirement." "You're missing a very important thing: YEAR END values in (U.S.) $ millions unless otherwise noted So 7098 is not $7,098.  That would be a rather silly amount for Coca Cola to earn in a year don't you think?  I mean, some companies might happen upon random small income amounts, but it seems pretty reasonable to assume they'll earn (or lose) millions or billions, not thousands. This is a normal thing to do on reports like this; it's wasteful to calculate to so many significant digits, so they divide everything by 1000 or 1000000 and report at that level.  You need to look on the report (usually up top left, but it can vary) to see what factor they're dividing by. Coca Cola's earnings per share are $1.60 for FY 2014, which is 7,098/4450 (use the whole year numbers, not the quarter 4 numbers; and here they're both in millions, so they divide out evenly).   You also need to understand that ""Dividend on preferred stock"" is not the regular dividend; I don't see it explicitly called out on the page you reference.  They may not have preferred stock and/or may not pay dividends on it in excess of common stock (or at all)."