More people are delaying Social Security benefits
It looks like people are now paying attention to the plethora of advice retirement analysts and writers — including me — have been offering about delaying Social Security benefits as a means of improving retirement security. The Social Security Administration’s Annual Statistical Supplement for 2013 provides evidence of a slow but steady increase since 2004-2005 in the age at which Americans start taking Social Security benefits, reversing a prior trend of claiming payments at earlier ages. Age 62 is the earliest possible age to start collecting Social Security benefits, but it results in the lowest possible monthly income. The first chart below shows that in 2000, 41.6 percent of new Social Security awards for men were for 62-year-olds. This percentage climbed to 50.3 percent by 2004, but dropped to 37.2 percent by 2012. Read more…