Social Security Update: New “At Retirement” Option

The complexities of the Social Security program can often leave clients feeling confused and uncertain.

To help your clients understand the intricacies of Social Security, you probably create a variety of planning scenarios that demonstrate how delaying Social Security or taking their benefits early can impact their retirement.

So to add flexibility to your Social Security modeling in eMoney, we’ve added a new Social Security Benefits Begin “At Retirement” option.

What’s Changed? 

Prior to this enhancement, you could initiate Social Security benefits to begin by selecting a specific age, or by selecting a client’s Full Retirement Age. If a client wanted to start his/her Social Security benefits at retirement, and see scenarios based on variable retirement ages, this added complexity to the advanced plan. Every change to their retirement age would require a corresponding change to their Benefits by Age setting under Social Security.

Coordinating the start of Social Security income with retirement has become a common scenario, so we set out to simplify the process of creating financial plans under this use case.

This new feature allows users to select At Retirement as the start of their Social Security benefits, so when you change the retirement age, the Social Security start date will change at the same time.

Note: If the elected retirement age is before age 62, Social Security benefits will begin at age 62. Conversely, if the retirement age is over 70, they benefits will begin at age 70.

With the At Retirement option, you can set the client’s Social Security benefits to begin at the default date of retirement. This means that advisors using an annual simulation setting will see benefits beginning on January 1, while those using the monthly simulation setting will see them begin the month the client reaches retirement age.

To clarify when Social Security income will begin, we now display the year and month of the client’s and spouse’s ages — the points at which the benefit will begin in the simulation.

You will see this new feature everywhere Social Security can be modified in eMoney including:

• Basic Fact Finder
• Advanced Fact Finder
• Advanced Planning
• Decision Center
• Needs Analysis

While this option will be the default setting for new advisors, you can make the change under Settings > Fact Defaults today!

Questions about the new At Retirement option for Social Security? Give us a call at 888-362-8482 or send us an email.