Does My Spouse Lose Her Social Security When Collecting Railroad Retirement?

Welcome everyone to another edition of the Highball Advisor's Railroad Retirement Mailbag. My name's John McNamara of Highball Advisors, and today's question comes in post from Celebration. "Does my spouse lose all that she has paid into Social Security or just get half my retirement?"

All right, so the short answer is she gets the higher of the two when she applies. Either the higher railroad retirement or a higher Social Security. However, with that said, I need to know a lot more, right? Are you retired? So you can't turn on spousal annuity until you get retired. What's her age? Right? Then you have age and work reduction, so there's a lot of strategies there. You throw in the survivor annuity, when's the right time to do that? So it's not as simple as that, but the quick answer is you get the higher of the two, but there's a lot of timing issues involved.

Check out my video How a High Earning Spouse Affects Your Railroad Retirement. That will give you some more examples what I'm talking about. All right, so railroaders, I hope you found this video helpful. Feel free to shoot in your questions. Maybe I'll shoot a video on them. Until next time, everyone, please stay safe, stay on track and take care. So long everybody. Bye.

Associated Video: " How a High Earning Spouse Affects Your Railroad Retirement" https://youtu.be/3TBQuFTytTc

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