MR.CB is off today spending time with his buddies (long overdue, bless him - I hope he's having a good time). I decided to use the time today to do a social security income projection. I've been meaning to do it for a while now. Using the Retirement Benefit Estimator on the SSA site, I was pleased that it allows you to plug in an earlier retire date to essentially plug in zeros from that age until you start pulling SS. However, the only SS retirement option it shows you is to start collecting at age 62. I guess they figure early retirees are more likely to claim at age 62? Anyway it does provide a good enough comparison. The difference between stopping to work at age 52 and continuing to work until age 62 and collecting SS at that time results in only $237 per month difference for Mr.CB and only a $280 per month difference for me. My difference is sightly bigger because I was a SAHM for several years (with zero income) and worked part-time for about 5 years (making my earnings much lower during those years). We now both exceed the SS income tax threshold every year, so I assumed we'd max out at the current limit of $118,500 for the next 9 years. I know it may be indexed up, but probably not a huge amount annually and this was a projection only.
The excercise confirmed for me with our actual personal income history what I've read about. During the bridge years of ER, little or no earnings will not have a terrible big effect on future SS potential. Since we both started our working lives at age 15, we both will have a minimum of 35 earning years by 2025! (me just hitting 35 actually). Another good reason why 2025 should be our last 'working' year unless we choose to! I also realized today that the small monthly pension I will get from a former employer about bridges the monthly gap between my SS income and Mr.CB's SS income, assuming we kick start both the pension and SS around the same age. This smoothes out the years I didn't work at all or worked part-time with less income. We have many years to decide the best strategy with both the pension and SS but it was nice to figure this out.
In other good news, with the market increases over the last couple months, we now are around 13.5X annual spending in retirement savings! How is everyone else doing? Have you seen a big improvement since January?