If you take your benefits early, you will get less forever as a penalty. If you wait, you are missing out on many monthly payments. There's a break even point at about 80, so that if you plan on living longer than that you do better to wait and if you don't live that long you do better taking your money as soon as you can. If you take your money early and invest it instead of blow it, your break even point would be later.
But, if you pay back past benefits you can basically start over. Like if you take your benefits at 62 you'd start getting your reduced benefits early. If you pay back every dime at 67 then you can start getting your unreduced benefits as if you had never collected. So wouldn't it make sense to take your money early, save/invest it, and then pay it back and start getting your bigger benefits? Would that be a good way to hedge your bets. So if you die early or need the money, you won't have missed those months of benefits, but if you make it to 70 you can pay back your benefits and start getting a bigger monthly check. You'd have to do the math of course. Like if I pay back 100K and make 1K more per month then it would be worth paying back at 70 if I live to be about 78 (made up numbers). I guess you'd also need to account for the inflation adjustment too--although you can't account for lower benefit laws and tax changes.
Asking bc I don't hear a lot about this strategy--maybe it's dumb. I hear about the reduction vs. the monthly benefits you aren't getting but I don't hear about the investment value of having that money early (I guess bc ppl assume you would blow it rather than invest it). Does this make any sense?
