When Should I Take Social Security? with David McKnight

When you take social security ultimately comes down to how long you are going to live. If you can accurately predict how long you are going to live you can accurately predict at what age you should draw social security. The question becomes “how do you figure out how long you’re going to live?”

One of the best answers is to simply go through the underwriting process for the Life Insurance Retirement Plan. When you go through the underwriting process you get one of thirty different ratings and you can use that to help determine when the best age to take social security is.

If you presuppose that you are going to live a nice long life you should put off social security for as long as you can. For every year after your full retirement age that you put off taking social security your monthly benefit increases by 8% per year.

A Roth Conversion counts as provisional income. If you do that in the years that you are taking social security you could cause up to 85% of your social security to become taxable. This is why it’s not a great idea to take your social security at a young age. If you take social security at 62, you are also locking yourself in to the lowest amount of social security you could get.

If you are doing Roth Conversions while taking social security at the age of 62, not only are you taking the lowest amount, you are also having your social security taxed. Any money taxed could have gone to accrue interest that would have benefitted you for the rest of your life.

The longer you live, the better off mathematically you are taking social security as late as possible. It also gives you more time to get your Roth Conversions done.

There are a lot of benefits to pushing your social security off, especially if you are going to live a long life and plan on doing Roth Conversions.

It comes down to going through the underwriting process and seeing if you can qualify for a Life Insurance Retirement Plan. If you get a good rating, it makes sense to puch social security off as much as possible. If it looks like you’re not going to live very long, then take your social security as soon as you can.

There is a huge opportunity cost when you pay a tax that you didn’t otherwise have to pay. Not only do you lose that tax, you lose what the money could have earned for you by investing it.