A great deal of Social Security advice quietly assumes the phone is unusable. Call early, call late, expect to be cut off, budget an afternoon. The agency now reports that the hold time behind that advice has effectively disappeared, which changes the calculation for anyone who has been putting off a call for a year…

Two numbers govern Supplemental Security Income, and they have moved in opposite directions for nearly four decades. One of them is adjusted every January for inflation. The other has been frozen since the first Bush administration. The gap between them is the reason a recipient who manages to save a modest cushion can lose the…

The most misunderstood rule in Social Security is the one that applies to people who claim a benefit and keep working. It is called the retirement earnings test, and it withholds part of a benefit when earnings run past a set line. It is also, in a way almost nothing else in the program is,…

When a spouse dies, Social Security offers a survivor benefit that is far larger than many people realize — and getting the timing right can mean thousands of dollars over a retirement. A surviving spouse can receive up to 100 percent of what the deceased worker was getting or entitled to, and a widow or…

One of the most overlooked benefits Social Security pays is one many divorced people assume they lost in the divorce. If your marriage lasted at least 10 years, you may be able to claim a benefit worth up to half of your ex-spouse’s full retirement amount — and doing so takes nothing away from your…

The early read on next year’s Social Security raise is now 3.6 percent, and on the average retirement check that works out to roughly $70 more a month. It would be the biggest cost-of-living bump in a few years, larger than the 2.8 percent that took effect this January. But the figure is an estimate,…

If a letter from Social Security says you were overpaid, the amount it can take back out of your next check is no longer a small slice. For overpayment notices dated on or after April 25, 2025, the agency’s default is to hold back up to half of a retirement, survivors, or disability benefit each…

Six to eight months. That, by Social Security’s own estimate, is how long a first decision on a disability application generally takes. For a household where the earner has already stopped working, that is not an administrative detail. It is most of a year with no paycheck and nothing arriving to replace it. On August…

For decades, a retired teacher or firefighter who also earned Social Security through other work could watch a big chunk of that benefit vanish because of a pension from a job that did not pay into the system. A 2025 law ended that. The Social Security Fairness Act repealed the two provisions responsible, and as…

Few letters land harder than one from Social Security saying you were overpaid and the money has to come back. What makes it worse is how the agency now recovers it: by default, it can hold back up to half of your monthly benefit until the balance is repaid. For someone who counts on that…