Social Security and You: Divorced widows may be due more money

I gave a couple of women very nice Christmas presents over the recent holiday season. And I’m not talking about the lingerie I got my wife or the coffee maker I got my daughter. I’m talking about the gift of extra Social Security benefits I got for two of my readers.

I don’t want to imply that I have some kind of “in” with my former colleagues at the Social Security Administration and that all I have to do is make a few phone calls and magically increase someone’s Social Security check. Sorry, I can’t do that. But I can explain Social Security rules to people, and sometimes my explanation leads to higher monthly benefits.

I will give some background for the cases involved, and maybe in doing so I will help other women get unexpected Social Security benefits.

I’ll call the first woman “Lisa.” She wrote to me late last year. She said she was thinking of filing for her Social Security at age 62. She didn’t like the idea of taking reduced retirement benefits, but she said she needed the money so she just made up her mind to live with the reduction. She wrote to ask me some general questions about applying for Social Security benefits.

She also told me that she was married many years ago, but that her husband died when they were both still in their 20s. That was way back in the 1980s. She had two subsequent marriages, but neither panned out and each ended in divorce after only a few years.

I told Lisa that before she proceeded with her claim for reduced retirement benefits, she should check into possible widow’s benefits on her first husband’s account. Lisa was a bit skeptical. After all, he died more than 30 years ago. And he died at such a young age that he had paid into the Social Security system for less than 10 years. Certainly, she thought, his Social Security benefit couldn’t be worth much money.

But I told Lisa about two vagaries to the Social Security benefit computation formula for survivor benefits that would work in her favor. First, past earnings are indexed for inflation. So those 1980s dollars her deceased husband made would be turned into present-value dollars for the purposes of figuring her widow’s benefit. And second, when they figure her husband’s basic Social Security rate (upon which her widow’s benefit is derived), they essentially treat it as if he was due his full retirement age benefit at the time of death. So I told Lisa she might be pleasantly surprised how much her widow’s benefit would turn out to be.

And I explained to Lisa that widows (and widowers) have one advantage other Social Security beneficiaries usually don’t have. And that is that they can file for reduced benefits on one record and later switch to full benefits on another record.

So I told Lisa to contact her local Social Security office and check into possible widow’s benefits and then compare them with her own retirement benefits and then play around with that “widow’s advantage” I just mentioned in the prior paragraph.

Long story short: Just before Christmas, I got a follow-up email from Lisa. She was ecstatic. She had been to her local Social Security office and found out she was due a more-than-adequate amount in monthly widow’s benefits off her deceased husband’s Social Security record — the guy who had died so many years ago. So Lisa filed for reduced widow’s benefits on his account.

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She will be getting 82.5 percent of his basic Social Security rate. She will collect those benefits until age 66, when she will switch to 100 percent of her own retirement benefit rate.

Or if she thinks she can live off those reduced widow’s benefits for another four years, she could wait until age 70 and then file for her retirement benefits, at which point she would get a 32 percent delayed retirement bonus added to her monthly retirement checks.

Lisa told me how thrilled she was to be getting those unexpected widow’s benefits. She thanked me profusely.

But truth be told, I may not have been as big a Santa Claus to Lisa as she thinks. My hunch is that had she gone to her Social Security office to file for her retirement benefits, the Social Security agent would have steered her to the widow’s claim anyway.

Part of the Social Security retirement claim asks about prior marriages. Those (and other questions) are designed to be possible leads for other potential Social Security benefits. A good Social Security clerk would have noticed that prior marriage and probably checked into widow’s benefits for Lisa even if I had never brought up the subject.

I also heard from another reader who learned of unexpected benefits from a long-ago departed husband based on a recent column I wrote. I will call her “Betty.” Betty, who is in her 80s, had been getting her own retirement benefits for years. She was married only once for 15 years. But that marriage ended 40 years ago. So she had essentially forgotten about the guy.

But in a recent column, I discussed divorced widow’s benefits. And that caused a little light to go on in Betty’s head. She did a little digging and learned her ex died almost 10 years ago. As far as she could tell, she met all the eligibility requirements for divorced widow’s benefits: She was (way) over 60; she had been married for more than 10 years; she was not currently married; and she figured her own Social Security benefit was less than her ex-husband’s rate.

So she contacted her local Social Security office and sure enough: She was due an extra $500 per month in divorced widow’s benefits. On the one hand, she kicked herself for not having filed for these benefits 10 years ago when her ex died. On the other hand, she was able to claim six months’ worth of retroactive widow’s payments — the maximum allowed by law.

Some readers may be wondering why those “leading questions” I mentioned in Lisa’s case didn’t work for Betty. Well, you must remember that when Betty applied for her retirement benefits, her ex was still alive. She wasn’t due anything extra at the time because a divorced wife’s rate is way less than a divorced widow’s rate.

So let this be a lesson to other readers out there. If you had a prior marriage, even one that ended many years ago, you may be due some extra monthly benefits from that spouse’s Social Security record.