Social Security information is meant to inform and encourage thorough evaluation and planning for either early retirement planning or normal retirement planning. The following article makes a strong statement for individuals developing a good retirement plan.

"Still some surety in Social Security"

Some very usefull sites for Social Security information.

http://best.ssa.gov - A screening tool you can use to see if you currently are eligible for Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, or Medicare Benefits.

http://www.ssa.gov/planners - Three benefits planners to help people estimate future Social Security retirement benefits.

http://www.ssa.gov/medicarecard - Application for replacement Medicare cards.

http://s00dace.ssa.gov/pro/fol/fol-home.html (00’s are zeros) - Locator tool that uses your Zip Code to find a nearby Social Security office.

Still some surety in Social Security
Experts are upbeat despite the system’s need of an overhaul!
by David Westphal - Bee Washington Bureau Chief

WASHINGTON - The future of the monthly Social Security check may not be so bleak after all! Despite a din of doomsday predictions about the baby boom’s impact on the national retirement system, some of the country’s foremost Social Security experts offer a remarkably upbeat assessment of the future benefits, saying cutbacks are likely to be mild or even nonexistent.

“Even after all the reform takes place, the person who is 45 today probably will still get more in retirement, in real dollars, than somebody who just turned 65,” said Eugene Steuerle, who studies Social Security at the Urban Institute. “My guess is that annual benefits, after inflation, will keep going up,” he said.

Steuerle is not alone in his sunny outlook. While the political debate in Washington is dominated by ominous warnings about threatened retirements, scholars say Americans needn’t worry that the monthly benefit check will be severely reduced.

“You’re going to get 70 to 75 percent of currently promised benefits even if congress adjourned and didn’t reconvene until after you’ve died,” said Henry Aaron, a prominent expert on Social Security at the Bookings Institution.

In fact, though, the likely outcome is much better than that, he said. Congress will solve the Social Security problem with a combination of fixes, said Aaron, and any action on benefits is likely to take the form of a gradual slowdown in annual increases, rather than outright cuts.

That’s not to say that Americans can quit fretting about retirement income. Millions of adults need to accelerate savings, experts say, because few retirees can live easily on Social Security alone. Nor does it let Congress off the hook. Long term, the Social Security system remains in serious trouble, and some sort of reform will be required to avoid hundreds of billions of dollars in deficits.

But supporters of the current system and advocates of private accounts believe the necessary changes can be made without making a big dent in retirement earnings.

How it’s resolved is no longer such a futuristic issue. The first of the 75 million baby boomers reach the early-retirement age of 62 in just six years. And the outlook for Social Security benefits, now sent to 35 million retired Americans, remains the most critical element of their retirement financial planning. About two-thirds of elderly beneficiaries receive most of their income from Social Security and its average $860-per-month payment.

That the monthly benefit might avoid wholesale cuts is not often mentioned in current fiery discussions, largely because many participants in the fray have a mutual interest in dramatizing the threat. “A lot of the discussion is misleading and self-serving,” said Steuerle.

Alicia Munnell, a Boston College professor, said the doomsday talk has intensified with the rise of the privatization movement. “If one is interested in changing the nature of the program, in order to make that case you really have to make an argument that the system is really broken,” she said.

The rhetoric has had an effect. Many Americans-young people in particular have concluded that they shouldn’t rely on Social Security for their retirement. A CBS News poll in August found that only one-third of adults believe the system would have the money available to provide expected retirement benefits. But Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan offered reassurance last week that Social Security isn’t going away. Even if the Social Security trust fund ran out of money, Greenspan told a retirement summit, “I cannot imagine a viable political scenario in which full payment of benefits will not be forthcoming.”

The reassuring words on are one part of a potentially brightening outlook for future retirees. Recent research by Cori Uccello, a health scholar at the American Academy of Actuaries, suggest that well over half of households are on track in their savings plans. But experts acknowledge Congress still has a big problem on its hands. According to projections by Social Security trustees, benefits will begin exceeding payroll tax revenue in 15 years. Very quickly after that, analysts say, the deficits will get much worse unless changes are made.

The main cause is the coming retirement of the baby boom generation (Americans born 1946 to 1964), which will double the number of Social Security beneficiaries by 2030. But that’s only part of the explanation. The financial problems are worsened by the fact that the birth rate fell sharply for succeeding generations, and by the growing amount of time people spend in retirement.

In 1940, shortly after Social Security began, the remaining life expectancy of a 65-year-old was 12.5 years. Today it’s 17.5 years. The upshot is that the ratio of workers to beneficiaries, now bout 3.4-to-1, is expected to fall below 2-1 just after the middle of this century. “It’s the double whammy - more elderly, not as many workers - that makes this so difficult,” said Steuerle of the Urban Institute.

In many respects, the financial problems of Medicare, the nations’s health insurance program for the elderly, loom even larger. According to Social Security trustees, it would take a 37 percent cut in benefits to keep the Medicare trust fund in balance through 2075. Left untouched, these two programs, Medicare and Social Security, could expand so rapidly that by 2075, they could amount to 15 percent of the overall economy, just shy of the proportion now claimed by all federal spending.

Despite the enormity of the Social Security problems there are many possible solutions- raising payroll taxes, subsidizing the system through general revenue, or tweaking benefits. One way or another, economist say, reformers will have to find a way to slow the rapid rate of benefits growth of the last few decades.

From 1957 through 1992, income after inflation doubled fro the elderly, far outdistancing the gains of those under 65. Meanwhile, the poverty rate for retirees plummeted by two-thirds, and now ranks on a par with the rest of the population. Slowing that growth is likely to be part of the final deal, said Boston College’s Munnell. “I think most people think there should be some adjustment in the way the cost-of-living calculation is made,” she said.

Meanwhile, the decades-long lead time given to politicians to solve the problem is fast ticking away. Trustees of the system concluded their annual report last year with a reminder to Congress that “the sooner adjustments are made, the less abrupt they will have to be.”

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