The Social Security Administration uses a formula to determine the credits you receive for income earned from your job
Determining how much money you will receive by the time you reach your retirement age can be an uncertain or difficult calculation. And it is that everything depends on the income you have during the years of your working life. For each amount, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will provide you with a certain number of credits. In Globe Live Media we are going to explain how it works.
Social Security’s golden rule is that the longer you work and the more you earn, the bigger your retirement check will be. Calculating how much money you are going to receive exactly is not something easy to obtain, since various factors intervene, but so that you can give yourself a clearer idea, we are going to explain how the SSA does it for the income that is obtained.
The first thing to know is that the SSA looks at your work history, adjusts your annual compensation for inflation, and then selects the 35 years of your working life in which your adjusted earnings were the highest.
Then add the earnings numbers and divide by 420, which is the number of months in 35 years of work. This is how the indexed average monthly income is obtained, which is known as AIME, for its acronym in English.
Then it’s time to take out your PIA, which is the primary insurance amount. This is determined with a formula where your year of birth is obtained. For example, as explained in a text from The Motley Fool, for those who turn 62 in 2022, the PIA is equal to 90% of the first $1,024 of your average indexed monthly earnings, plus 32% AIME, plus the 15% of any amount over $6,172.
The next point is to define at what age Social Security payments are going to be requested: as early as possible, it is established that they can be obtained at 67 years of age and the latest that they can be requested is at 70 years of age.
Calculating each senior’s retirement amount is really complicated, and doing it yourself can be difficult and even confusing. So the best thing is that you turn to an expert to help you do it or, access the tools posted in the Social Security Administration (SSA), which will help you know how much money will correspond to you according to your income and the age at which you retire.