Waiting for Social Security
is a purchase. Here is the price.
Everyone frames this as a break-even age. That is the least useful number in the decision. If you retire before your benefits start, you fund those years out of your savings, which means waiting is something you buy, and you pay for it with your portfolio.
So the real question is what waiting costs, what it buys, and whether your own money could have done better. This runs all three.
Where should we send your results?
Tell us where to reach you and the calculator opens right below. You will get a PDF of your own numbers to keep and to take to whoever helps you with this.
- What waiting until 70 actually costs out of your savings
- The return your portfolio has to beat to make claiming early the better call
- What is left for your heirs under each choice, at any age you care to check
- How the answer changes if Congress does not fix the trust fund
Your Social Security trade-off
Round numbers are fine, and the defaults are a reasonable starting point. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.
The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report projects the combined trust funds run short in 2034, with 83 percent of scheduled benefits payable thereafter. The retirement fund on its own is projected to run short in 2032 at 78 percent. This is a projection under current law, not a prediction of what Congress will do.
That is what your portfolio has to earn for claiming early to beat waiting.
What each choice leaves behind
The same household, the same portfolio, the same spending. The only thing that changes across this chart is how long you live. Values are what would be left in the accounts, in today's dollars, at the median of every historical return sequence we run.
Where the monthly money comes from
Your retirement paycheck, year by year, under the choice you have highlighted above.
The same plan, run through every market history we have
One average return is a fantasy. This runs your plan through each starting year from 1928 onward, in the real order those returns happened, so you can see how much of the outcome is the decision and how much is luck. Pre-2008 years use investor returns extended backward, and the method is in the disclosures.
The average investor did not lose to the market. They lost to the money they never invested.
The returns in this calculator are not index returns. They are what investors in each asset class actually earned, asset weighted, from our own data. And the single biggest finding in that data has nothing to do with picking funds.
Forty three cents of every dollar American households hold is sitting in cash and money market funds. Every equity sleeve combined is less than thirty eight cents. That is why the all in average investor return looks the way it does, and it is why the answer this calculator gives you depends so heavily on what you told it in step 3.
Cash and money market funds, as a share of all invested household assets.
The average money market investor's annual return over the last ten years. Cash on deposit earned less.
The average US equity investor's annual return over the same ten years. Same decade, same country, same people.
Want a second set of eyes on this before you file?
We offer a no-obligation Financial Review. No pitch deck. We look at what you have, tell you what we see, and you decide whether it is worth going further. Claiming is one of the few retirement decisions you largely cannot undo.
Verde Capital Management, Inc. is a federally registered investment adviser. 8031 Ortonville Rd, Suite 210, Clarkston, MI 48348. 248.528.1870. verdecm.com
Educational illustration only. This is not investment, legal, or tax advice, not a recommendation to claim Social Security at any particular age, and not a substitute for advice about your own circumstances. Every figure produced by this tool is hypothetical and depends entirely on the assumptions you enter. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and no outcome shown here is promised or guaranteed.
Social Security. Benefit reduction and delayed retirement credit calculations follow the Social Security Administration's published formulas for a full retirement age of 67, and the 2026 cost of living adjustment of 2.8 percent. Spousal, survivor, and widow's limit rules are modelled in simplified form and do not cover every situation, including divorce, work in non-covered employment, government pensions, disability, dependent children, or the retirement earnings test for someone still working. Trust fund projections are from the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report and describe current law, not any enacted change.
Taxes. Federal only. State income tax, including any state treatment of Social Security benefits, is not modelled. Brackets, standard deduction, and long term capital gains thresholds are the 2026 amounts and are indexed forward at the inflation rate you set. The taxation of benefits uses the statutory thresholds, which are not indexed. The senior deduction reflects current law and expires after 2028. Medicare Part B and Part D amounts use the 2026 brackets with the standard two year income lookback. Tax results are illustrative and are not a tax return.
Returns. Returns by asset class are average investor returns, asset weighted, for complete calendar years 2008 through 2025, from Verde Capital Management's own broad asset class data. They are net of fund level expenses and are not net of any advisory fee. Because eighteen years is not enough history to show sequence risk, years before 2008 are synthesized: for each asset class we measured the average annual difference between the investor return and a matched index proxy over the 2008 to 2025 overlap, then applied that difference to index returns for 1928 to 2007 drawn from the Damodaran historical returns dataset at NYU Stern. Every year before 2008 is therefore an estimate of what investors would have captured, not an observed investor return. Inflation history is from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis consumer price index series.
The values you enter are used only to display your results in your own browser and are not transmitted to Verde Capital Management. Your name, email address, and phone number are collected so that we can send you your results and follow up with you, as you consented above. Verde Capital Management has no affiliation with, and receives no compensation from, the Social Security Administration or any data provider referenced here.