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Social Security Reform and Widow Benefits
A brief issued this month by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.analyzes the quandary of widow benefits vs. the benefits available to a surviving spouse in a dual-earning situation. As explained in the brief, “a widow from a $100,000 single-earner household would receive more in widow benefits than a widow from a $100,000 dual-earning household under the current calculations,” a quirk that further exacerbates the likelihood of more widows falling into poverty. Reverse Mortgage Daily’s Maggie Callahan offers a summary of the brief in a post you can access here…
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I am a widow living on a federal annuity. My husband’s Social Security is not much at all. He did not work for any level of government. When he died in 2013 I was told I was not eligible to receive his Social Security. I was furious because I am on a very limited annuity and I don’t get social security because I am missing four quarters and I didn’t contribute to it because of the federal employment. How in the world can the government do that to people in my situation? I could use his Social Security because right now I am living check to check and have been selling my furniture and jewelry to make ends meet.
Ms. Hill:
Thank you for the comments. As explained to a previous comment (see reply to Matthew Menze, below), the subject of Social Security’s Government Pension Offset (GPO) provision generates quite a bit of comments from our constituency. Unfortunately, it appears you are subject to a total GPO offset under rules that reduce or eliminate your Social Security benefit as a spouse because your federal pension was the result of non-SS-covered work. As noted below, AMAC has been advocating for Social Security changes for many years, and has been resolute in calling lawmakers’ attention to the need for (1) changes to address the long-term solvency problem facing the program, and (2) formula adjustments that can achieve better equalization of benefits for all beneficiaries. In fact, in an earlier edition of AMAC’s Social Security Guarantee Act, we supported complete repeal of both WEP and GPO as part of a compromise that would promise long-term solvency. This latter point was dropped from the Guarantee framework, along with several other adjustments that we feel are appropriate. Despite their removal from the current proposal now being advocated, AMAC continues to collect supporting commentary for use in the future when negotiations unfold. In other words, we haven’t given up, but we well recognize that these types of adjustments must be offset by savings or income improvements in other areas of Social Security reform.
In the meantime, thanks again for your thoughts, we sincerely appreciate hearing from our readers.
Gerry Hafer
AMAC Foundation, Inc.
Notice: The opinions and interpretations expressed in this message are the viewpoints of the message’s author, a trained advisor accredited under the National Social Security Advisors program of the National Social Security Association, LLC (NSSA). The author, the NSSA, and the AMAC Foundation are not affiliated with or endorsed by the United States Government, the Social Security Administration, or any other state government.