You might have often heard retired people or people who are planning to retire in the near future talk about social security benefits. Knowing about social security benefits is a must for everyone who wishes to have a carefree retired life. A common mistake that many people make is knowing only half-truths about social security benefits that they most probably got from their book club friends or the group of grandpas that they occasionally converse with during the morning runs.

You must work for a minimum of 10 years
You must earn work credits if you want to reap the benefits of social security. So, every year, according to your wage growth, you must earn a certain amount to get a work credit. This amount increases every year as your income shoots up.

You need a total of 40 work credits to claim your Social Security benefits. Unfortunately, in a year, you can only earn four work credits, which means that you need to at least work for 10 years to be eligible for social security benefits.

Your benefits reduce if you don’t work for 35 years
The Social Security Administration (SSA) collects the data that shows your maximum 35 years of earnings and uses it to calculate your average indexed monthly earnings (AIME). With this AIME, the SSA then calculates your primary insurance amount, which is the basic benefit that you will get when you retire.

How does this calculation method negatively affect people? There are many people who do not work for 35 years in their life. It could be because they start their career late or they retire prematurely. So, in their case, the SSA averages the years they did not work as $0 earnings. This negatively affects the overall average amount and your benefit considerably reduce.

You can claim social security benefits with your spouse’s work record
The best part about Social Security is that you can claim your benefits with your spouse’s work records. If you are married and your spouse is alive, then you can claim for social security benefits of your spouse, provided you are you are at least 62 years of age and your spouse is already receiving disability or retirement benefits. You can also claim benefits if your spouse has passed away under the survivor’s benefits. For this, you need to be at least 60 years old or above. Note that you can claim benefits on your ex-spouse’s work records even if you are divorced. The condition here is that you must be unmarried (your spouse can remarry), at least 62 years of age, and you must be married to your ex-spouse for at least 10 years.

Delay in the claim will pay you handsomely
If you want to get a 100 percent benefit of your social security, it is best to wait till you have crossed your full retirement age. If you claim the benefits any time before the full retirement age, you will get only a certain percent of your benefit. Similarly, if you are claiming social security benefits as a spouse, it is again best to delay collecting the insurance amount until your wife or husband’s full retirement age.

You have the luxury of withdrawing your claim
Let’s say that you regret claiming your social security benefit at an early age. If you start second-guessing your decision within the first 12 months of claiming, the ball is still in your court. You can simply withdraw your application for the benefits.
After this, all you have to do is return all the amount that you received in form of your benefit or as a spousal benefit. You can restart your benefits at your full retirement age when you will be getting a much higher amount in form of the benefit.

You can have a do-over
If you are an early claimer and do not wish to give back the benefits that you received, you have another option of having a do-over. Here, you must suspend your benefits once you reach the full retirement age and then restart your benefit after few years. Meanwhile, your benefit for those years will earn delayed retirement credits of 8% each year.
In this way, when you restart your benefit after a couple of years, you will observe that your monthly premium insurance amount will get up to a 32%, which means that it will compensate for the low amount you got all the years back from early claiming.

To make the most of the social security benefits, make sure that you are fully aware of all the criteria and conditions that come along with the benefits.