So if I am understanding this correctly, if a claimant decides to suspend benefits, his (or her, rarely) ex will no longer be allowed to apply for spousal benefits until the claimant’s kick in? That’s farked up. Divorced women ( and men) can draw on thier ex-spouses SS benefits, assuming they did not remarry. Typically, men worked longer and were paid more, so few divorced men would benefit by drawing on thier ex-wives benefits. Spouses draw 1/2, so really a spouse would have had to never worked or never earned much to benefit vs drawing on their own benefits. Remember this? Yeah, reading it, it looks like it used to look like this: Guy becomes eligible for social security at 66, but postpones taking the benefits until age 70 so that his base SS pay will increase 8% per year over those four years. Guy’s wife claims her spousal benefits as soon as he claims, so she’s earning money from his account while he’s earning bonus payments for not taking the money. That sounds like double dipping, and I’m not really outraged that they’re closing that loophole. I did learn SS is more complicated than I realized, I thought all retirees just got a set amount per month when they retired until they died. I knew that if you took it early you got less, but I didn’t know you could ‘bank’ it and earn more, or that the amount you receive was based on your income before taking it, I thought everyone received the same amount. Oh well, a few decades before I have to worry about it, we’ll see what it looks like then. The other things people should realize is that just by making it to an age where they can collect Social Security, they have an average chance of living a long life in retirement. If you need money to eat then there’s not much point in saying wait to collect, but if your excuse is “I won’t live long anyway,” it might be worth understanding what the odds really are. http://retirementrocketscience.com/the-older-you-are-the-lon...