Baby boomers anticipate that 47% of pre-retirement earnings will be replaced by Social Security, according to results of an annual survey from the Nationwide Retirement Institute. But the reality for someone making what the Social Security Administration considers the average wage in recent years, about $60,000, is more like 37%, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. And the percentage drops as household income rises.
Alternate: https://archive.ph/Hx1PM
Here is an interesting tool to understand how Social Security works. It walks you through it, but basically you grab your earnings numbers from mySSA and paste them into the tool, and then the tool will give you a breakdown of what benefits to expect based on predicted future earnings.
Yeah, that’s the weird thing about the article: why make guesses about what you’ll get when the SSA will give you a breakdown/projection.
Yup. It takes about 30 seconds to get a pretty accurate estimate of SS benefits. However, you need to be careful to know whether it’s inflation adjusted. The first tool I linked is in today’s dollars, whereas mySSA is in future dollars.
So maybe that’s where the confusion lies? Regardless, it’s really not hard to figure out, there are tools available.