My Retirement Regret: Why Waiting Until 70 to Claim Social Security Was a Mistake

You hear it everywhere. Financial experts, retirement planners, even your neighbor who reads too many money blogs will tell you the same thing. Wait until 70 to claim Social Security. Let those delayed retirement credits pile up. Watch your monthly check balloon by roughly a quarter more than what you’d get at full retirement age. It sounds like such a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

I believed it too. Honestly, I was convinced I’d made the smartest financial move of my life. Three years into retirement now, I’m sitting here wondering if I outsmarted myself right into a corner.

The Math That Fooled Me

For each year delayed past full retirement age, 8% is added to Social Security benefits, which means if you retire at age 70 in 2026, your benefit would be $5,251 at the maximum level. The numbers looked gorgeous on paper. I ran the calculations dozens of times, comparing what I’d receive at 62, at my full retirement age of 67, and finally at 70.

The projections showed that at around age 78 and 8 months, you reach the break-even point, when your cumulative benefits from claiming at 67 surpass those you’d get by taking retirement at 62. For waiting until 70, starting at 70, you’d get approximately $970 more a month, or about $11,640 more a year, and it would take about 10.4 years to break even, so you’d be 80 and change when claiming your maximum monthly benefit begins to pay off. I’m healthy, I thought. My parents lived into their late eighties. Waiting seemed like the obvious choice.

What I didn’t factor in was how much life I’d be giving up in those eight years between 62 and 70.

The Life I Postponed While Chasing Maximum Benefits

Here’s what nobody talks about when they’re pushing you to delay. Those years between 62 and 70 are often your healthiest, most active retirement years. My knees were better at 65 than they are now at 73. My energy was higher. My enthusiasm for travel and adventure hadn’t yet been tempered by reality.

I worked three extra years past 67 just to maximize that benefit. I told myself it was discipline, smart planning. Looking back, I wonder if it was fear disguised as prudence. During those years, two of my closest friends passed away, both younger than me. One had just claimed at 62 and got to enjoy exactly four years of retirement before a heart attack took him. The other waited like me, made it to 69, and never saw a single Social Security check.

Research backs up the conventional wisdom about waiting. Research has repeatedly revealed that 70 is the best age for the majority of retirees to maximize their lifetime Social Security benefits. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that more than 90% of younger Americans are better off waiting until 70 to claim benefits because this gives them the best odds of maximizing lifetime income. Yet only 4% of retirees waited until age 70 or later which would have maximized their monthly benefit. Maybe the other 96% know something the spreadsheets don’t.

The Health Factor Nobody Wants to Admit

Life expectancy calculators are useful tools, but they deal in averages and probabilities. The Social Security Administration’s 2023 actuarial life table based on 2020 data gives a life expectancy of 81 years for a 62-year-old male and 84 years for a 62-year-old female. The average 65-year-old female can expect to live to 86 years old, and males can expect to live to 83, according to CDC data.

Those are averages, though. Your actual lifespan depends on factors the government actuaries can’t measure. Chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, high cholesterol, tobacco use, obesity or Parkinson’s disease reduce an individual’s projected life expectancy.

I’m fortunate to be in decent health now, but a diabetes diagnosis at 71 changed my perspective entirely. Suddenly those break-even calculations shifted. While a healthy 65-year-old man with no chronic conditions has a 19.3% probability of living to age 95 or longer, that gets reduced to a 17.5% chance if he has high blood pressure, and drops even further with other conditions. The mathematical certainty I felt at 67 dissolved into a fog of medical appointments and adjusted expectations.

The Hidden Cost of Depleting Other Savings

Waiting until 70 meant I had to live on something else for those extra years. I drew down my 401(k) faster than planned. I tapped into savings I’d earmarked for other purposes. The stock market wasn’t kind during a couple of those years, which meant I was selling investments at less than ideal times to cover living expenses.

Many retirees have an annual household income of $55,000 (estimated median) as of late 2023, and retirees’ household savings excluding home equity were $71,000 (estimated median) in 2023. With limited resources, the decision to delay Social Security becomes much more complex than just looking at monthly benefit amounts. Every dollar I pulled from retirement accounts was a dollar that couldn’t grow anymore. Every investment I liquidated was one less stream of potential income.

The opportunity cost of waiting is real, even if it doesn’t show up in those cheerful retirement calculators. I could have claimed at 67, kept more of my portfolio intact, and potentially had better overall financial flexibility. Instead, I rigidly followed the conventional wisdom and depleted other assets to chase that bigger monthly check.

What I Would Do Differently Now

If I could rewind to age 67, I’d claim my benefits then. Not at 62, which probably would have been too early given my financial situation. Though, let’s be real, data from Bankrate shows that close to a quarter of all retirees claim their Social Security benefit at 62, making it hugely popular despite what experts recommend.

The advice that people who expect to live long lives should delay the start of benefits is sensible but hardly justifies the advice that “the vast majority of American workers should delay taking their retirement benefits until 70.” That assessment from financial researchers resonates with me now more than it did back then.

The break-even analysis assumes you live long enough to reap the rewards. It assumes your health holds steady. It assumes the future is predictable. Life rarely cooperates with our spreadsheets. Those three years from 67 to 70 represented trips I didn’t take, experiences I postponed, and flexibility I surrendered for a theoretical payoff decades down the road.

I’ve now been collecting for three years. My larger monthly benefit feels nice, sure. Yet I can’t shake the nagging thought that I traded some of my best years for incrementally bigger checks in what might be my declining years. The math might still work out in my favor if I live to 90. Will I? Nobody knows. What I do know is that I can’t buy back my late sixties, when I was healthier and more energetic than I am now.

Everyone’s situation differs. Some people genuinely benefit from waiting until 70, especially if they’re working anyway, enjoying their job, and in excellent health. For me, the decision to wait was driven more by fear of making the wrong choice than by a clear-eyed assessment of what would truly serve my life best. Looking back, claiming at full retirement age would have given me the freedom and resources to live more fully during years that matter more than I realized at the time.

Did I make a catastrophic mistake? Probably not. Will I still be okay financially? Most likely. Would I make the same choice again? Not a chance.