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Social Security

Last updated October 5, 2026

Four steps: copy your three figures from ssa.gov, add your partner's if you have one, pick the age your benefits start, and decide how to fund the years before they do.

SSA prints three figures, not one: what you'd get at 62, at full retirement age, and at 70. Enter all three if you have them. They are not one number with a percentage applied, each assumes you keep working until that age, so the base behind them differs. On one statement the figures were $2,748 / $4,129 / $5,216, which works back to a base of $3,926 if you stop at 62 and $4,206 if you work to 70. Deriving the outer two from the middle one therefore reads about $142 high at 62 and $96 low at 70, and the gap between claiming early and claiming late comes out roughly $240 a month too narrow.

Entering the 62 and 70 figures makes those two ages exactly what SSA told you, with the ages in between interpolated along the standard adjustment curve scaled to meet them. Leave them blank and nothing breaks: the plan falls back to the actuarial rules alone, which are right for a fixed benefit and are what every plan used before these fields existed.

While the full-retirement-age field is empty, a rough estimate is offered from your current income alone. It is not built from your 35-year earnings history, and it is never applied on its own; you have to click "Use this."

A later start always means a bigger monthly benefit for fewer years, so which one adds up to more money depends on how long your plan runs. Your plan works that out from your own figures: it values every claiming age against the age you set your plan to cover to, discounts future benefits at the same safe real yield used elsewhere in your plan, and names the one worth most.

It also states the age you would have to reach for waiting to pay off. That is the number worth judging for yourself. There is no life table behind any of this and no guess about your health, because mortality varies by far too much for a population average to say anything useful about one household. The horizon is the one you chose on Household, and changing it changes the answer.

Whether you can afford to wait is a separate question, and the only one here that needs the simulation. It is behind its own button because it takes about twenty seconds, and it asks whether the plan survives the wait rather than comparing monthly spending between neighbouring ages, which differ by a fraction of a percent.

Retiring before your benefits start leaves years to pay for from savings. The reserve is how much of those years you hold somewhere a bad market cannot reach. It follows your claiming age, and it costs: reserve money earns its yield rather than the market's for the whole of retirement, not just the bridge, and every figure on your dashboard already includes that cost.