Today I completed my application with the Social Security Administration, filing for my retirement benefits to start paying out in May. Yup, I'm finally on my way to officially being labeled: RETIRED.
Of course I haven't worked for a few years now (really) having long since been jaded to the whole rat race of it all. Yes there was that couple/three month dalliance back in '23 with the Costanza job and some other timid attempts to make money in the most lazy ass way possible in the past few years but not since '18 have I really considered myself gainfully fulltime employed.
The online application process was quite painless other than the fact that it pretty much required me to go back to having a cell phone again since it has that freakin' two factor authentication BS and there's no getting around it to gain access to the SSA website. Once everything starts getting finalized though, we'll see about me keeping that pain in the ass monthly albatross of a bill with Straight Talk.
Here again is my estimated monthly payout which, I think, will actually start in June since the site says it is paid "a month held back" style:
Yes, it's the $1,363 amount. The others are if I waited. There are several reasons for me not to wait, but mainly I don't want to use up the bulk of my IRA to live off of until then and factoring my anticipated overall life expectancy.
But as I've mentioned, I should be good with living on just $1,363 a month. After all, I've been living a rather meager life all these years.
You see, one other little tidbit of info the Social Security has on file for you is your track record of income over the years. ALL THE YEARS. Since your first job to your last. And here it is, all splayed out, year after year. All the ups and downs. All the blood, sweat, and tears distilled down into annual dollar totals, each and every year, decade after decade.
From my first job as a dishwasher at a small restaurant in a working class New England town when I was a 15 year old boy to my last job, ironically, a job coach in a small Florida town, as a jaded 59 year old senior citizen.
Oh, the zero years of 1984 and 1985 were because I worked for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and we were unionized and had our own state-run retirement fund which somehow avoided Social Security deductions and diverted those payments into our pensions (which I was able to cash out, and did, back in 1986 when I quit) so no SS records of income for those years. My estimates are that the incomes were roughly similar to the next two years of 1987 and 1988.
So what's the tote board say Ed? How much did I make in my entire lifetime?
$763,518
I'll subtract $25,490 for '23 and '20, the recent "play" jobs, and also the teenager parttime "living with my parents" jobs from '79 to '83, and factor in the real fulltime working years from 1984 to 2018 to figure a yearly average from the new total of $738,028 over a span of 34 years:
$21,706.71 a year.
So yeah, I've been poor all my life. I can continue on down this same old road.
