Social Security Spousal & Widow’s Benefit – The benefits of copper water containers

Marcus C:

Welcome back to the CD Financial Podcast, CD Financial, where health meets wealth. I’m Marcus Castillo, your host. That is Chuck D. As always, the man with the plan. Chuck, how you doing today?

Chuck D: Fantastic Marcus, how about you?

Marcus C: I’m doing okay, I have no complaints yet. Happy to see you back here.

Chuck D: Sweet. Happy to see you too. It’s always a pleasure to be with you. So, Marcus, today I want to talk about social security, especially as it relates to widow’s benefits and spousal benefits. And the reason I want to do that is because it’s a pension. Social security is a pension. We don’t always think of it that way, but it is.

Marcus C: Fantastic! That sounds like a great topic.

Chuck D: You paid into it your whole career and out comes a payment to you for the rest of your life and your spouse’s life. So that’s how it works. Even if your spouse never worked.

I actually, know this because I talk about my in-laws, my mother-in-law, very hardworking lady. But when it comes to actually being employed, I think at TI down in Texas in Dallas for a couple of years, then she got married and she got pregnant. She started having my wife and then her kid brother. So she was a homemaker and she did a lot for the kids, but she didn’t work for 10 years. And that’s the vesting period – 10 years or 40 quarters that you have to work under social security to be vested or to earn enough to get a social security payment.

Marcus C: Interesting. You know, real quick point – in Spanish, the word that they use for social security, they refer to it as a “pensión.” So it is the way to think about it. Oftentimes you just refer to it as “pensionado.” So people think of retirement in terms of a pension plan. And so just to back up real quick, because you’re already getting into stuff as far as benefits go with spouses.

You’re saying that even if the spouse is not working, there are some benefits there?

Chuck D: Absolutely. So going back to my in-laws, for instance, or my mom, come to think of it too. Yeah. So let’s say my benefit, I’ve worked my entire working years and I get a $3,000 social security payment. My spouse, if they didn’t work, would qualify for half or $1,500. Now that’s oversimplified. It depends on if you wait till your full retirement age, like 66 and 10 months, 66 and a half. 67 or you file early like let’s say your wife or husband filed at 62 and you’re at 65 but to oversimplify to make it clear your spouse qualifies for half so let’s say I think the minimum benefit now I’m not even sure let’s say it’s 600 bucks and you have a $3,000 benefit and let’s say my wife has $600 benefit well she’d file for her benefit and then the additional $900 to give her half of mine would be paid technically through my own benefit. But that’s how it works. Even if your spouse didn’t qualify, they will qualify for half of your benefit.

Marcus C: That’s interesting. Let me ask this – does that apply like day one? I get married to somebody and I’m married to them for a week or two or a month or a year or is there a time frame that I have to wait before that applies to me?

Chuck D: Well, there’s a 9-month window so that folks cannot sell off their benefit, let’s say. There’s a 9-month window that you have to remain alive if you’re married before there’s any spousal benefit. But in that case, you wouldn’t get half of your spouse’s benefit. If there’s a widow’s benefit, you would be able to elect. Let’s say that again, in that scenario, there’s $3,000 and then one of the spouses has half as much, $1,500. If one of them dies, let’s say the one passes away for the $3,000, then the other spouse has to go to the Social Security office or online and select the larger of the two benefits. So that’s a spousal benefit as well. But just to be clear, you have to elect for the greater of the two benefits. And so that’s why in the social security maximization plan, we like for the one benefit that is less earning, oftentimes to elect sooner and the one with greater earnings to maybe delay longer in their life. So that’s an idea, but that’s not always the case because maybe the one with lower earnings is much older than the other one. Usually not. Usually, we see the older of the two in the marriage. It’s in most cases the one that makes more. It’s not always the man, but oftentimes is. Nowadays we’re seeing women making a lot more than the man in many cases. So, you know, it’s a generalization and I try to stay away from those as much as possible because everybody’s family dynamic earnings record is different. So let’s talk about the widow’s or widower’s benefit.

Marcus C: Widow or widowers. So how long do you have to be married to someone before that actually applies?

Chuck D: Yeah, again, it’s a 9-month window, you have to be married for exactly 10 years or longer. So the date of marriage and the date of divorce have to be 10 years or longer. So let me tell you a story. She lives here in Southern California in the Los Angeles basin. And I always ask, I said, were you married to anybody for 10 years or longer? Yeah, the kids’ dad, like 11 and a half years. I go, really?

Well, so how’s he doing? She goes, Oh, he’s doing okay, but he’s back in New Jersey. I go, okay, just let me know if, and I don’t want to sound morbid or even mean or evil about your ex-spouse, but I want to know if they ever pass away. I want to be informed.

Marcus C: Why would that matter?

Chuck D: In her case, he did pass away like a year and a half later. She was still working. And I said, really? He passed away? Yeah, he did. I go, well, now we can layer it into the plan. Well, she said he didn’t work that many years and he didn’t make that much money. I go, well, why don’t you go down to the Social Security office? Do you have his name, his birth date, his Social Security number? She said, yeah, I go, well, go down there and get an estimate of what the widow’s benefit might be. I go, absolutely do that. She goes, really? I go, really? Go down there and find out.

Marcus C: So you’re saying that this would still apply even if that person remarried?

Chuck D: She had not remarried, but if you have remarried, I want to get this spot on. So, let me tell you what it says from the Social Security Office, ssa.gov. If you’re divorced, your ex spouse can receive benefits based on your record. Even if you have remarried, your marriage lasted 10 years or longer. But, if you remarried before age 60, you cannot collect benefits on your former spouse’s record unless your later marriage ends. So if it ends, you can do that, which reminds me of something else too. And then we’re going to come back to the widow’s benefit. And it works for men too, widowers. If you earned very little, and let’s say your mate earned a whole lot of money, half of their benefit, you can file for half of their benefit. If you earned hardly anything and your benefit is $800, and your spouse’s benefit is $4,000. You can file for a spousal benefit that will more than surpass your own benefit. As long as you haven’t remarried, as we’ve said before age 60, then you can file for a spousal benefit and you can reap those benefits. Now, if you’re thinking, I’m going to sock it to my ex-spouse, that’s not what’s going to happen here.

They could have been married, let’s say, 10 years or longer, three times. And each one of the ex-spouses could file for a widow’s benefit if it’s in their best interests, and it won’t affect the payout for the former spouse at all. It’s just a benefit that’s available to you.

Marcus C: Interesting. So it’s just something that you just have to be aware of and if it happens then you go and apply and take advantage of that. So what would happen if you take the benefit before full retirement age? Because you kind of alluded to that.

Chuck D: Well, okay, so let’s go back to the story of my friend and client in Los Angeles. They couldn’t take the widow’s benefit, although if you’re not working, and I say not working, you can take it as early as age 60, the widow’s benefit. Even if you’ve divorced, you can collect that benefit. But the reason for her not wanting to do that is because she was still working. So the cutoff, let’s say it’s around $22,000, $23,000 in income, if you start to collect a benefit, they’re going to start taking away money for every dollar you make above that. In her case, being a great GS employee of the federal government making a 1310, like $150,000, she wouldn’t receive any benefit. But we layered into her plan that when she retired, you better believe the moment she retires, she’s filing for a widow’s benefit. So she could collect, and this meant about $1,350. Now, Marcus, do you know why that matters? At 63 and a half, she’s collecting $1,350. But what’s happening to her own benefit? She made a lot of money for many years. What’s happening to her own benefit every year that she delays?

Marcus C: So it’s gonna be going up! Absolutely.

Chuck D: It’s going to go up, up and up. And what happened in her case was now she’s approaching, say, sixty six. She’s starting to talk about file for her own benefit. But based on the longevity of her parents, she’s probably going to make it into her 90s. I’d like her to delay as long as we can, because what happens is from sixty two to sixty seven, your benefit goes up by about five and a half to five and three quarters percentage. But from 67 to 70, it goes up by 8%. And so that looks pretty tasty if she was to delay. So in her case, we can get her at least at this point in her life, over $3,000. So she’ll go from 1350, where we may have to lay into the retirement savings plan to get income. We have to lay into that pretty heavy, but only for a limited period of time. If she files a 68 and she had four and a half years of leaning on her portfolio and her retirement income. Now, we can trigger that event. Maybe it’s $3,200 at 68, 68 and a half. And now she’s got a pension that’s increased a whole lot just because of that. Yeah, just in the last year, we’ve been able to do this several times where we’ve done the widow’s benefit and the widows had no idea they could do that. And it also, of course, works for man as a widower as well. So it’s a win for them all the way around.

Marcus C: I would dare say Charles, there’s a lot of people that don’t know they can do that. I would guess that there’s probably a lot of opportunities for those who’ve had those circumstances where they’ve lost their mate and think “-Well, now I’m on my own.” Social security wise, I get my own pension, but I’m not getting anything else from he or she. Depends on who their spouse was.

Chuck D: Yeah, and here’s the thing too, the Social Security Administration is not going to reach out to you if you had an ex-spouse that passed away, right? They’re not keeping track of that. They’re not chasing you down and saying, hey, hey, hurry up. You got a widow’s benefit that’s coming to you. They don’t do that. In fact, when you go into the Social Security office

Marcus C: The government doesn’t call you to tell you hey we’ve got free money for you?

Chuck D: In fact, they used to automatically give you the larger of the two benefits. When your spouse would pass away, if you were still married, they would just automatically do it. But now they don’t. You have to go down and elect the larger payment. So if you’re still married and your husband or your wife has a bigger payment, you have to go down there and say, hey, I want to dump my lower payment and get the bigger one. Can we do that pronto, right now? And another point, Marcus, is that the Social Security Administration, they’re not going to try to figure out all the nuances for you. All they’ll do is present your payments to you. And if you don’t know enough to tell them about an ex-spouse that may have passed away, they’re not going to know about it. In fact, they’re not supposed to tell you what to do because they could get into legal implications for recommending one strategy or one age over another. So there’s that.

Marcus C: Right, it becomes financial advice at that point, and they’re not supposed to give you financial advice. That makes sense.

Chuck D: Yeah, they’re not supposed to give you that kind of advice. They could put their job in jeopardy. So let’s talk about another scenario.

I have somebody that I help and I work with, and she’s from the Andes. They have a very long, long longevity in her family. I’m talking like maybe triple digits for her. And we created a plan because she was married to her husband for a long time too, the husband and father of her two kids. And so we knew well ahead of time. She wasn’t divorced, she was a widow. And so I said, listen, here’s the plan. You’re gonna go down to the Social Security office and you’re gonna ask for your widow’s benefit and you’re gonna delay your own benefit till age 70. She says, okay, she went down to the Social Security office. Do you know what the office told her?

Marcus C: What’d they tell her?

Chuck D: You can’t have that benefit. You can’t have that benefit, they told her. You don’t qualify for that. Now, she met with me again and I said, that’s just not true. What I want you to do now is I want you to go down to the Social Security office again, and I want you to ask for the manager this time. Every office has a manager and an assistant manager. I said, ask for the manager. They’ll know what you’re trying to do. She went down to the Social Security office again. Guess what they told her the second time?

They told her again she couldn’t have the widow’s benefit.

Marcus C: That she couldn’t do it?

Chuck D: Exactly. She was talking to the manager and the manager told her she could not have the benefit. So again, she came back to me this time she called me from the parking lot in tears and I told her that’s just not true. That’s not true. At that same time, the manager of the office called my office and left a voicemail where she said, we misunderstood what kind of a benefit she was applying for. We’re gonna start her widow’s benefit now and all is right as rain. Now, Marcus is like this, if she hadn’t known and she hadn’t had a plan, hadn’t got professional counseling here, what would have happened to that widow’s benefit?

Marcus C: Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, how nice is it to have someone in your corner that’s gonna help you watch out for stuff like that because it would be a good chunk of money she’s losing out on.

Chuck D: Yeah, poof, up in smoke, would have went that benefit. She’d have triggered her own benefit. And let’s say it was like $2,300. That’s it. That’s all she would have got. Now her benefits are at about $3,600, $3,700 a month. Do you think she’s happy?

Marcus C: Yeah, absolutely an extra $1,400 a month does the body good!

Chuck D: It sure does. And the whole time she was collecting the widow’s benefit, she was getting something out of it, meanwhile she waited till age 70. And in her case, it was about six and a half years that she collected the widow’s benefit. Then she was able to bridge to her own benefit. So that’s a little something.

There’s something else I want to mention here.

So there was a couple that I was helping, but they had never married. And he didn’t have that big of earnings. But the domestic partner did, they never married. And so when she passed away, she was still working, and she was passed her 62nd birthday. She was still working. And what was upsetting to me is she was a federal employee. If they’d have just put a ring on it, then he would have qualified for her widow’s benefit from Social Security. And he would have qualified for the federal pension.

Marcus C: So you’re saying you’d lose out on those benefits just by not being married even they’ve been domestic partners for decades? That’s crazy!

Chuck D: Yeah, just by not being married. You didn’t have a marriage certificate. So you got to put it on there, right? And we had already said, it’s got to be at least nine months that you are married to get those benefits. Yeah. So there it is.

Marcus C: Yeah. So if you have that situation, you have a domestic partner for decades, what are you waiting for, right? You might as well get that done. I mean, you’re moving the same direction. You’re working as a partnership. Why not get married? The benefits are there.

Chuck D: Well, especially if their health is starting to fail. Yeah, that’s right.

Marcus C: Yeah. Good call. Just to put a finishing touch on this particular conversation this part of the conversation it’s good to have someone in your corner who can give you this information and who can guide you along you know we’ve talked about in other episodes the necessity of a plan if you have a plan in place you have someone guiding you then you don’t lose out on these little benefits that you may or may not know exists and you know you ultimately, you’re not leaving money on the table and who wants to do that, right? It doesn’t benefit you.

Chuck D: Yeah, especially if it’s from the government and you’ve been paying for it your whole life while you work, right?

Marcus C: You’ve been paying all that social security all those taxes for years that’s the idea of it, great so do you have a health tip for us today?

Chuck D: You better believe I do. But first I got a picture for you. Let’s see if I can find it. Here it is.

Marcus C: It’s a copper water kettle.

Chuck D: Yeah, and then there’s a copper teapot behind there. But let’s just talk about the copper and its benefits for us through water, for your drinking water. I know that sounds weird, but there’s quite a few of them here. I’ll read it to you because I had to look it up. Now, we’ll talk about filtering your water on another episode, but right now I just want to talk about the benefits of copper. And here’s a weird thing. We remodeled our house. We gutted it out. We’re in Laguna Niguel, basically South Laguna Beach. We gutted it out. And when they came back in, we’re talking five years ago, they came in with The pex, that really thick plastic tubing. That’s what’s in now.

Marcus C: Yep, that’s what it is. We had one of those bursts at our house.

Chuck D: I really wish honestly Marcus, I would have gone to copper piping and spent the extra money especially pre-COVID, I’ll tell you why. Water passing through copper has a lot of benefits and people could jump in on this if they want to and make comments. It says here copper helps improve digestion and prevents constipation and acidity. How about that? It raises your alkalinity. It has anti-inflammatory properties. It boosts immunity. It improves brain and heart health and has an antibacterial effect. I think it also has positive charging, right? Because you know, we’re all electrochemical. If you were in school and you ever had one of those static electricity things that your science teacher had, he touched the your your metal on your belt and then you held hands with all your students and you made a ring. We used to do that with Mr. O’Shell. I’m sure he’s gone now in middle school back at the Fort Couch. But we all got zinged, right?

Marcus C: Yeah. Interesting that’s that’s good stuff. I know it does clean the water up I know about the antibacterial properties of the copper on the water Interesting with the taste that’s that’s good to know so you’re filtering it and then running it through the copper excellent. Everything now is plastic tubing, so I wholeheartedly agree. Now we don’t need to go back to the lead in the plumbing, but maybe go back to the copper in the plumbing.

Chuck D: Yeah, I remember with Pasquale when I was roofing as a kid, when I was 17, 18, tearing out in the city of Pittsburgh, tearing off copper gutters and downpipes. The stuff would fold up, but heavy stuff. And I think back and I think, man, oh, man, people used to have copper around their houses. And my wife has told me that it actually has good electronic charging, maybe positive ions or something to that effect. And it’s really good for you. Copper. So there it is. Another precious metal. Some people you’ll see copper bracelets that they wear.

Marcus C: I’ve seen that a lot of chefs will use copper also for for cooking certain foods. The copper is actually better for it. So good stuff, man. Absolutely. Well, good. So excellent. So a couple of things just to wrap up, but take away from today, we had some nice conversation about Social Security benefits.

Get someone on your side who knows we don’t want to leave money on the table, especially after you’ve worked your entire life paying the government paying taxes paying your social security on time make sure you’re getting the full benefit of that particularly if you are married and your spouse passes away you wanna make sure you get those benefits as well and copper give it a shot try copper kettle see what it does for you and it worst thing it’ll clean up your taste your water right Charles make it taste a little bit better in the morning fantastic.

Chuck D: That’s right. Yeah. And don’t forget, even if you’re divorced, you haven’t remarried, you were married for at least 10 years or longer, you might get that widow’s benefit.

Marcus C: Go get those benefits don’t leave the money on the table well we appreciate you as always tuning in and this has been the CD Financial podcast CD Financial where health meets wealth.

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