CBS News recently published an article designed to explain retirees’ options for taking Social Security. It lists the three “choices” for retirement that the government has decided to give workers: Either retire before the Full Retirement Age (FRA) and receive less money per month, retire at the FRA and make a normal amount of money, or retire after reaching the FRA and claim more money.
Unfortunately, the FRA keeps rising for workers, forcing them to work for longer and longer periods of time before they reach retirement with full compensation. The FRA is steadily increasing from 65 to 67, and will certainly continue to rise.
The government sees this as the only way that the current system can prolong its inevitable bankruptcy, but workers are finding ways to get around these government mandates and still receive the same amount of money. A recent study performed by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that increases in the FRA lead to increases in the number of workers that apply for Disability Insurance (DI). Today’s workers realize that they can take DI at 63 until they finally hit the FRA and still come out ahead.
People are smart enough to get around the arbitrary government mandates concerning Social Security, so why not eliminate them all together? By allowing investment into Personal Retirement Accounts, individual workers would be given the opportunity to actually choose what to do with their retirement money instead of being forced to conform to (or circumvent by claiming DI) a number of arbitrary governmental formulas.
