WAITING GAME

More Retirees Are Holding Off on Social Security

The reason? If they wait, they get higher monthly payments—and their current expenses are lower because of the pandemic.

Retirement filings were up 5 percent over the last year—but the number of people claiming Social Security benefits was down in the same period. The Washington Post crunched the numbers to explain what’s going on: Some people leaving the workforce are holding off on collecting Social Security because they know that waiting until they are older means they will get a higher monthly payout. And they can afford to do it because the pandemic has meant lower expenses for many of them, along with the cushion of stimulus payments and ballooning stock portfolios. “I just decided I’d had enough, you know?” Fawn Michel, who is 62 but doesn’t intend to apply for benefits until she is 70, told the paper. “When you have friends and family dying from something like this, I’m thinking, ‘Well, you do this now, or maybe it’s never going to happen.’”