If you’ve spent any time researching when to claim Social Security, you’ve run into two camps that don’t agree on much.
One says wait until 70. Every year you delay past your full retirement age, your benefit grows by about 8%. The math, they argue, is unbeatable.
The other says claim earlier, sometimes as early as 62. Take what you’ve earned. Don’t gamble on living long enough to “catch up.”
Both sides are confident. Both can show you charts. And if you’re a few years from retirement, trying to make a decision that will shape the next thirty years of your life, the disagreement isn’t reassuring. It’s exhausting.
The disagreement exists because the question is harder than either side admits. The right time to claim depends on your health, your portfolio, your spouse, the kinds of risks you’re most exposed to, and what kind of retirement you want. There isn’t one universal answer that works for everyone.
This is one of the most important conversations we have with clients in the years before retirement. Let’s walk through what it involves.
Why “Wait Until 70” Isn’t Always the Right Advice
The case for delaying is real. If you wait until 70, your monthly benefit will be roughly 77% higher than if you claim at 62. Over a long retirement, that’s a lot of money. And because Social Security continues for life and adjusts for inflation, a larger benefit gives you more protection against outliving your savings.
Those are genuine advantages, and for some people they’re decisive.
But “wait until 70” is built on an assumption that’s easy to miss: the only thing worth measuring is the total dollars you’ll receive over your lifetime. When researchers run the numbers that way, delay almost always wins.
Real retirement planning isn’t a math problem with one variable. It’s a balancing act across several risks at once, and delaying Social Security helps with some of them while making others worse.
Seven Risks to Consider in Timing Social Security
These are the considerations we walk through with clients before recommending a claiming age. Some will weigh on you more than others, and that’s the point.
1. Mortality risk
Longevity risk, the risk of outliving your money, gets most of the attention in retirement planning. Rightly so. But the opposite risk also exists: living a shorter life than you planned for.
If you delay until 70 and pass away at 71, you’ve collected very little of what you spent decades paying in. In a marriage, the survivor benefit may not fully make up the difference. This is what many clients are quietly thinking about when they say they want to claim earlier. They’re not being irrational. They’re weighing something real.
2. Sequence of returns risk
If you retire at 65 and wait until 70 to claim, you’ll spend five years pulling more from your portfolio than you otherwise would. If markets happen to drop during those years, you’re selling investments at low prices to fund living expenses, and that damage can be hard to recover from.
Consider a retiree who claimed at 62 heading into the 2008 financial crisis. By drawing less from her investments through the downturn, she could have ended up with a healthier portfolio years later than a neighbor who delayed, even though the neighbor’s monthly check was eventually larger. Claiming earlier reduces the strain on your investments during the early years of retirement, which is when sequence risk tends to be highest.
3. Policy risk
The Social Security Trustees currently project that, without legislative changes, the program’s retirement trust fund will only be able to pay about 78% of promised benefits starting in late 2032. Whether Congress acts is anyone’s guess. Historically, when changes have been made, benefit reductions have tended to be grandfathered for years. Tax changes have taken effect immediately.
You don’t have to be alarmed about this to take it seriously. For some clients, building a benefit reduction of that size into the plan creates confidence either way. If the cut never happens, that’s good news, not a problem.
4. Regret risk
Two scenarios. You delay claiming and receive a terminal diagnosis at 69. Or you claim at 62 and live to 95, eventually receiving less in total benefits than if you’d waited.
Mathematically, the second may cost you more money. But the first is the one that haunts people. The way we experience regret isn’t symmetrical, and pretending otherwise in your planning means ignoring something that genuinely affects how you’ll feel about your decision for the rest of your life.
5. Health span risk
Lifespan and “health span” aren’t the same. The years when you’re physically and mentally able to fully enjoy travel, family time, and the experiences you’ve been saving for tend to come earlier in retirement, not later. An extra $20,000 of income at 64 may pay for a meaningful trip with adult children. The same $20,000 at 88 may sit in an account.
Claiming earlier can give you more spending power during the years you’re most likely to use it well.
6. Spending flexibility
When something unexpected comes up whether a child needing help with a down payment, a once-in-a-lifetime trip, or a family medical situation — the money has to come from somewhere. Social Security can’t be advanced. A larger portfolio (the kind you keep by claiming earlier and drawing less from investments) preserves your ability to say yes when life asks something of you.
7. Underspending risk
Recent research from David Blanchett and Michael Finke confirmed something many advisors had long suspected: retirees spend their guaranteed income, like Social Security, much more readily than they spend from investment accounts. Decades of saving builds a strong saving muscle and a much weaker spending one.
If a larger Social Security check would actually let you enjoy your retirement more, because you’d be willing to spend it, that matters. For some clients, claiming earlier is the difference between a retirement they live and a retirement they manage.
Still saving in these final years before retirement? One of the most common questions we hear from people 5–8 years out is a simple one: where should the next dollar actually go — the 401(k), a Roth, a taxable account, somewhere else? We share a one-page flowchart that walks you through that decision step by step, including the tax and flexibility tradeoffs. When you download it, you’ll also receive a short email series about why I built Thistle Wealth, how we work with clients, and how to know whether we’d be a good fit.Download the “Where Should My Next Dollar Go?” flowchart. Scroll to the bottom of the home page to sign up.
So How Do You Actually Decide When to Claim Social Security?
We don’t turn this into a math contest. We walk through your specific situation and ask which of these risks weigh most heavily in your life.
Two examples make the point.
A couple in their early 60s with a $500,000 portfolio, modest pension income, no longevity in their family, and a strong desire to travel while they still can. For them, claiming earlier often makes sense. The sequence-of-returns risk of bridging to age 70 is real. The mortality risk is real. The lost time is real. Delaying could cost them more than it saves.
A different couple in their early 60s with $10 million, both with parents who lived into their late 90s, and no particular hurry to spend down assets. For them, delaying often makes sense. The longevity protection of a larger Social Security check is genuinely valuable, and they have plenty of other assets to live on in the meantime.
Most clients are somewhere between these two. The conversation is about figuring out where you actually are.
What we try to avoid: making the decision based on a generic rule, the headline of an article, or what a friend at a dinner party did. Your plan should reflect your life, not someone else’s.
What This Looks Like at Thistle Wealth
When we work with clients on retirement distribution planning, the Social Security claiming decision is one piece of a larger conversation. It connects to your tax strategy, your withdrawal plan, your healthcare costs before Medicare, and what happens if one spouse passes away first.
We don’t pretend to know the future. We don’t time markets or guess at what Congress will do. What we do is help you see the tradeoffs clearly so you can make a decision you’ll feel good about, instead of one you second-guess every time the news mentions Social Security.
If you’re 5 to 8 years from retirement and stuck on questions like this, that’s exactly the stage where good planning makes the biggest difference. The choices you make in this window are some of the most consequential of your financial life. They deserve more than a rule of thumb.
Ready to talk it through? Every client at Thistle Wealth begins with a comprehensive financial plan, and Social Security timing is one of the conversations we walk through together. Reach out through our contact page to schedule an introductory call.
This article is for general educational purposes only and is not personalized financial, tax, legal, or investment advice. Your situation is unique and may call for different strategies than those described here. Please consult with a qualified professional who can provide guidance tailored to your specific circumstances. All investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal.
