I have several long-time friends who worked for cash and rarely filed taxes, or only worked for a few years when young and then were stay-at-home moms. They barely paid in enough to qualify for SS benefits.
Each of them gets about $550 a month.
Think of that, they barely paid in anything, and they get 20% of what the max person gets. But the max person paid in much more than 5 times what those guys paid in. Much, much more. It’s just not a retirement program, it’s a redistribution program too.
My son took to drugs right out of high school and died at age 36 of an overdose. He never worked a real job in his short life. And yet the one year old little girl he left behind, our new grand daughter, receives $950 a month in SS survivor benefits. She'll receive that until she's 18, I believe. I think it might even help send her to college too.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't begrudge my granddaughter the money she receives. I'm glad she gets it. Her dad died. She'll need it growing up. Hopefully her mother won't spend it away. They were't married and she's not that reliable.
But my point is, the system pays her over half of my benefits and her dad never worked a steady, full-time job and yet I worked my whole life.
No wonder the system is broke.
anyone who has a family business if your kids work to earn spending money while growing up in the business have them pay into social security because the way payments are calculated is from the first payments made so if your 10 year old is being paid to clean the office or pull weeds in the parking lot they can start there social security history...the key is that the formula is number payment periods and the highest rate of pay. what this does is make it so that if for some reason later in life they get disabled and end up on social security at say 38 years of age rather then starting the calculations at 18 for work it starts at ae ten when the kid was working for your business rathe then only 20 years of work on the calculation it is 28 years and rathe then getting maybe 700 dollars a month they et maybe a thousand. this only works for private family businesses because of a waver in the law.....this info is dated by 20 years so it might not be the case now but I thought that it was interesting info