Does anyone know how to estimate the amount of your benefit if you quit working early?
The website gives you your estimates for retiring at 62, 67, and 70 with the assumption that you are working right up until then. What I want to do is see the effect of quitting early.
I have no idea. I didn’t expect this to be complicated at all. I just think of my mother. She applied to receive her benefits at 62 and passed away the month before she would have received them. That’s what sucks. You work your whole life and if you die, no one gets YOUR money. I don’t want that to happen to me.
As the J.G. Wentworth commercial goes “It’s my money and I want it now!”
There is some info here. Your benefit level is based on your 35 highest-earning years. It appears some sort of inflation adjustment is applied ("Your actual earnings are adjusted or “indexed” to account for changes in average wages since the year the earnings were received."). You can see a couple of hypothetical examples here.
Beyond that, your actual benefit level depends on how long you wait to start collecting, increasing approximately 8% a year between age 62 and 70. If you are still working, you should probably wait until age 66 at the earliest, since before then, your benefit decreases if you have other income.
There are online benefit calculators, where you can enter your information and see an estimate of your benefit. Also, there is an offline calculator, an app that you download, which runs on Windows and Mac. The offline calculator is also available as C++ source code.