You've probably heard some version of this before. You should always wait until age 70 to collect Social Security.

That's how you get the most money. But here's the thing. That's not actually true for everyone.

And in fact, for many people, it's quite the opposite. So before you commit to delaying, let's first talk about when that decision might backfire. As a financial advisor, I've worked through this exact math with hundreds of clients before

and really seen the nuances and the intricacies of when might it make sense to delay versus when

might that actually cost you. So let's start by

understanding the math here. The idea of waiting until 70 comes from very simple math. Once you

reach your full retirement age, every year beyond that that you wait up until age 70, you get the

benefit of a delayed retirement credit. A delayed retirement

credit comes up to 8% per year, broken down into monthly increments, that continues to grow your

benefit all the way until it maxes out at the age of 70. On paper, that sounds unbeatable, but retirement's

not lived on paper. It's lived in reality, and this decision on social security actually impacts every other

decision with your financial planning as well. This will impact your investments, your taxes,

and even your overall lifestyle strategy. So before you delay, let's take a look at what that

impact might be so you can see what might make most sense for you. To do this, I'm going to

provide some additional context around waiting until 70 and some of the implications. And I'm going to show you two case studies, one where this worked, one where it didn't, so you can identify what makes sense for you. So going back to collecting at age 70. It is absolutely true that if you wait until 70, that benefit at age 70 is the highest benefit you could possibly receive. There is no disputing that. But there are tradeoffs. The biggest tradeoff that people fail to understand is this. Let's assume you don't retire at 62. You retire at 62, but you want to delay your social security benefit until 70 because you know you're going to lock in a higher investment amount or a higher income amount, I should say. But in those gap years, during that eight years of time, where is income going to come from? Well, for most people, income is going to come from their portfolio. Nothing wrong with that. We invest so that one day we can withdraw. But here's the context. Or here's what that matters. If you start pulling from your portfolio at age 62 and you do that for eight years, that's eight years of money that you're pulling out of your portfolio, and there's an opportunity

cost to that.

And to properly frame that, people don't collect their social security benefit early because

there's an opportunity cost.

It's going to cost them the higher amounts of social security that they could have later

received had they waited until later age, such as 70.

Well, that same thing applies to your portfolio.

Every year that you're drawing down your portfolio, that's less money that would have

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