I know someone who is sharing benefits with an ex-wife. You are referring to a woman that has her own benefits.

That is not true. They may have a private agreement to share a benefit, but any ex-spouse who was married for at least 10 years is entitled to receive a spouse benefit from SSA and they do not need to share it with anyone. The ex-spouse benefits can apply to multiple spouses as long as each one was married to the SSA worker for 10 years. There is no sharing of SS benefits. However, you can only receive one benefit at a time, based on the largest benefit you are eligible for. Is it possible that the ex-spouse was not married for 10 years? In that case, they would not be entitled to any spouse benefit from SSA, but the current spouse could share it with a private agreement.

After paying the government SS for over 50 years they are now starting to give some back. Personally I would have rather not paid the government for my retirement (SS) and invested the money myself.

Hmmmm I didn’t contribute much
 

and I don’t get much lol $128 a month

Very important to me. They help pay for the home care assistance that I need

Southern shutters or just shutters

Not everyone collects more than he or she put into the system (obviously).

My father passed away the day his first SS check came in the mail. My mother had to return it because he died on May 31st and the check was for the month of June. :(

kathy

Perhaps they are sharing the funds in a retirement account (401k, Roth, etc.) An account in one party's name might be considered a marital asset because it was earned during the marriage and a judge might order it to be shared post-divorce.

kathy

The reporting standards are not the same between countries and comparing them tells you very little. If you look at the article below, you'll see that most of the "disadvantage" the US has in IMR disappears when they account for age at birth and birth weight. In fact in the first month, the US has a BETTER IMR than Finland and Austria. It seems that most of the issue with IMR is based on socioeconomic class which drives it down. Most of this happens when the child is home in a poor neighborhood after the first month.

From the National Institute of health. Why Is Infant Mortality Higher in the United States Than in Europe?

>>>> Cross-country comparisons of aggregate infant mortality rates provide very limited insight, for two reasons. First, a well-recognized problem is that countries vary in their reporting of births near the threshold of viability. Such reporting differences may generate misleading comparisons of how infant mortality varies across countries. Second, even within a comparably-reported sample, the observation that mortality rates differ one year post-birth provides little guidance on what factors are driving the US disadvantage<<<

When the system was set up the retirement age was 65 even though the vast majority did not live that long.

That allowed SS to build up a very large nest egg.

Not exactly fair to the people who paid in and didnt live to collect.

If someone in the private sector set up a system like that they would probably be doing 10 years in Leavenworth as they used to say.

Nope. Infant mortality is a very small part of determining the quality of health care in differing countries. Like I said before, if you haven't lived in other countries, you have absolutely no way of understanding the difference between "their" health care system and treatment and ours (America). Another area to consider when comparing is the cost and the available service. But, Americans think that other countries are great because they have "free" health care. There is NO "free" health care. If you pay out half or more of your paycheck to the gov to pay for the "free" stuff, you will appreciate the difference also.

I disagree. A spouse's SS is based upon her earnings. My spouse received SS before I did because she is older. When I started receiving my SS, SSA asked me if I wanted my spouse to have her's computed on half of mine, which was a larger amount. Of course we said "yes." My wife receives more now than she did based on her own earnings.

I think we are talking about two different things. I was replying to a poster who said that an ex-spouse had to share their spouse benefit with a current spouse. That is not true. If an ex-spouse was married to a SSN worker for at least 10 years, they qualify for the "spouse" benefit regardless of whether the worker is currently married, or if there are other ex-spouses. Anyone who qualifies for an SS benefit can receive the benefit without any sharing. If you qualify for a benefit based on your own earnings and also based on your spouse's earnings, you can opt to go with the higher of the two benefits.

DITTO and that’s all in CAPS for a reason!!! :bigbow:

Ahh, my misunderstanding. That's the way I understand it also.

Index investing and dollar cost averaging has far outperformed managed investing by “wizards” and just takes some emotional control not to sell when the market slumps. Every high school student should read the book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” by Burton’s Malkiel.

Social Security was never intended as a system where you got back what you put in.

Yes, there are people who don't get back what they put in but imagine the uproar if you got cut off when you reached the amount you paid in. You can't have it both ways.

Social Security is broken because too many people are getting benefits that exceed what they contributed. There are also challenges with population growth, or the lack thereof which leads to more people drawing benefits than those that are paying in.

The system needs an overhaul and some people are going to be unhappy. The longer Congress kicks the can down the road the bigger the gap becomes. Congress continues to accumulate debt at extraordinary levels that someone will have to pay back. Those of us over 60 are hugely fortunate as most/all of the solutions will fall on our children and grand-children.

I was fortunate enough to make good financial decisions so that in retirement I would not have to depend on either. However, knowing that I paid into the SS program during my entire professional employment career I would still expect to get the share I am entitled to regardless of my current financial position.

When the government comes up with a plan to socialize security for its people, it’s not always in the best interests for its people. Not many live into the 90’s. They knew the average age of death. They in government ( no matter of party) could only see a win win situation. Pay all your life into ss and most die before or shortly after receiving a few years of checks. What a bargain! However the wise investors would’ve had a million $ to leave their children or spouse. Probably a lot more than $1,000,000. Now then, people who blew their money and lived paycheck to paycheck would have nothing but government housing and food stamps. Of course the streets could be lined with the homeless! (Just a thought) the Amish n old order mennonites never pay one penny to social security and they seem to manage well being out of the system.

I always have an issue with the way that the word "entitlement" is often used in this argument. IMHO, we who have paid into the SS system for decades are entitled to the benefits that we have paid for all these years.

Calling welfare and medicaid entitlements is wrong to me. Those reaping those benefits are not entitled to them. They are charity.

I think that we have it backward.

If the money that we paid in was invested conservatively, we would all have more in our accounts that we paid in and for most of us, more than enough to last the rest of our lives.

Congress has "borrowed" money from this fund over the years and has never paid it back.

Consider all of the people that die before they reach retirement age. My wife died at age 59. My mother died at age 58. My mother in law died at 65 and never collected SS. So take that money and add it to the money that I, my brother and sister and my brother in law get and it's a lot more than any of us paid in.

This money was never invested properly and it Congress should never have been allowed to use it for other purposes.


And no one will ever pay back the national debt. It will just keep growing and growing and growing.

I agree. But, the word "charity" seems to have a different meaning when it comes from the Government. Some people feel a reluctance or guilt when taking charity from an individual or private organization. But, when it comes from the Government, they will take all they can get. Maybe that is why they call it an entitlement.

"Medicare is funded through the budget and it was invested poorly for both social security and Medicare." OK if these funds were "invested" and not a transfer of money where were they invested?

If SS was an option most of us would never pay. Bad investment. The gov is gambling you won't live that long. But calling SS payments an entitlement is an insult to those that worked hard all their lives.

SS started off as a ponzi scheme and now the govt is concentrating on mismanaging the funds.

Feel sorry for our kids and grandkids as congress keeps kicking the can down the road and the further they kick it the harder it will be to fix.

I'd be curious as to which country makes you pay more than half of your income to the government for healthcare.

I too have lived more than half my life overseas, and found the health care coverage in my original "home" country much preferable to what we have here - and the tax rates are about the same. Quality of care is just as good, perhaps even better in many ways. There's far too many middlemen with our system, and the billing is so opaque it makes competition a joke.

I really struggle to see what's so great about our heatlhcare system here given we spend so much for so little. For that I suspect we are over-billed and perhaps also over serviced.

I worked and paid for these for 40 years. I spent time away from my family working when I would rather have been home. Yes, they both help a lot with our overall total income and make things easier but I would have moved here anyway even if I had to work part time. Medicare help with my wife's health issues a lot.