No. of Recommendations: 2
"How can you be sure SS will be there?"
It will be, to five or six 9s certainty. What happens if nothing is done is that Social Security will be reduced by ~22%, coming solely from collected SS-related tax revenues. In the particular case, both the FRA and the Wait-til-70 payout will be reduced by ~22%. Given that, the Wait-til-70 payout will be reduced to roughly the pre-reduction FRA payout.
On that sole basis, you're still better off waiting until 70 to start--that's when you'd get, roughly, the original FRA.
The kicker is that there are a myriad of factors specific to the individual that will potentiate or deprecate that baseline. It remains necessary to run the personalized numbers.
Eric Hines
