Social Security

Ever since I started diving into social security income analysis, I’ve had one question that kept popping into my head: how will retiring early via FIRE affect your social security (SocSec) income?

This is a site about hitting Financial Independence ASAP after all!

Will you still get SocSec? If so, how much lower will it be? Can you offset that lost income by saving a bit more? How much longer would you need to work to get that needed savings?

Now that I have the tools to compute future SocSec for any scenario, I can finally get some answers!

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When to start taking social security benefits is by far the most requested topic I’ve received. 

But I couldn’t really tackle that question until I had a social security income model in place. Which I now have! 

So let’s take a look. 

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The past few weeks I’ve worked on a new tool to compute social security income (which the Social Security Administration (SSA) refers to as retirement insurance benefits (RIB)), which I’ve also done my best to validate against other available calculators.

This week I extended my tool to provide future RIB estimates – which is what I ultimately care about for doing the FI/RE financial analysis I’ve discussed previously. 

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After building a tool to compute social security income, I really wanted to check it against other social security income calculators out there before diving into the analysis I want to do. 

Validation is critical! I really want to make sure the results I get are trustworthy.

So I found a bunch of online calculators and got busy doing comparisons.

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I’ve been wanting to code up a tool to compute social security income for quite some time now, and I finally made some significant progress on that front!

To build this tool, I had to gather all the relevant steps and calculations from across various ssa.gov and third-party sites – which was not trivial.

So, the objective of this post is to have every calculation and table needed to compute standard social security income, which the Social Security Administration (SSA) refers to as retirement insurance benefits (RIB), in a single page. 

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Social security income (SSI) is a bit tricky when it comes to taxes. Though “a bit” might be an understatement for many folks.

Now you may be wondering why I’m talking about social security income on a blog about FIRE. Isn’t social security going to be gone by the time any of today’s early retirees reach their 60’s?

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