Requiring social security can actually be more difficult for married couples. Here’s why

Choosing an age to sign up for Social Security is far from easy. If you apply for benefits on your full retirement age (FRA), you will receive the full monthly benefit where you are eligible based on your earnings record. This is what FRA looks like, based on the year you were born:

Data Source: Social Administration.

In the meantime, you can sign up for Social Security from age 62, but for each month that you apply for benefits before FRA, they are reduced on what is generally a permanent basis. Or you can delay your submission past FRA and increase your benefits by 8% per year, up to age 70.

Landing at a present age is difficult enough when you are single. Claim benefits too early, and you risk cutting yourself a huge amount of income in your life. But if you delay Social Security and do not live a long life, you also lose financially: You increase your monthly benefit, but decrease your life advantage. Hard as that decision can be when you are single, in some respects it is even harder when you are married.

Image Source: Getty Images.

If you have a partner to consider

The decisions you make about your social security benefits can affect your partner in a number of ways. First of all, if your partner has never worked and is counting on collecting benefits for children, he or she may not be able to apply for them until you start drawing benefits yourself.

Now imagine that you want to wait until age 67 to register for Social Security, but your partner wants to start collecting at 62. He or she will not be able to collect that income until you are ready to do so yourself, and that is a disagreement you need to work out.

Then there are benefits for survivors to think about. Once you are over, your partner will be entitled to a monthly allowance equal to 100% of what you received while you were alive. The longer you wait to claim your own benefits, the more your partner gets to collect.

But delaying benefits may not match your plans, especially if you do not expect to live that long. As such, you may be stuck in a situation where you have to weigh your own needs against those of your partner, and that is not an easy thing to do.

It is for these reasons that requiring Social Security may be harder when you are part of a couple than it is when you are single. Sure, being married also gives you some flexibility. If your partner is entitled to their own benefit, you will have the option to apply for Social Security on one earner’s record and delay your second benefit, allowing it to grow. That is an option that single seniors do not have. But at the end of the day, when you are married, you have to take into account the needs of your spouse when you submit at an age, and that can make an already difficult decision even more difficult.