“This is a lifetime decision, so you’re seeing a smaller benefit” year after year, Eskovitz says. “If you don’t have any other retirement income, that can be really devastating.”
Video: Should You Claim Early Social Security During an Economic Downturn?
A ‘foot in the door’
Clint Banner was planning to start retirement benefits at 68, more than a year after his full retirement age of 66 and 8 months. That would have bumped up his monthly payment by more than 9 percent above his FRA level, under Social Security’s system of delayed retirement credits. Similarly, his wife, Christine, intended to hold off claiming a spousal benefit on his earnings record until she hit her FRA of 66 and 10 months.
But the North Carolina couple started getting nervous, Clint Banner says — about a volatile stock market biting into their savings and about members of Congress warning that “we can’t keep Social Security going [because] it’s going to bankrupt us.” So the retired veteran and telecom engineer took his retirement benefit in late 2024, when he reached his FRA, and Christine Banner filed her claim in February.
“We’re going to end up getting less, but we wanted to have our foot in the door,” he says. “We were thinking that if they do some stupid stuff [to change the program], we might be OK in terms of being grandfathered because we were already getting it.”
The Banners are far from alone in their fears, and not without reason: The most recent annual report by Social Security’s trustees projects that the surplus in the program’s trust funds will be depleted by 2034, as benefit payments outpace the payroll tax revenue that funds the program. If that happens, Social Security recipients will still be paid out of annual tax revenue, but they will get only 81 percent of their scheduled benefits.
Another June 2025 AARP poll, of U.S. adults age 18 and older, found widespread confusion about the implications of a trust fund shortfall. More than a third of respondents believed Social Security payments would stop if the trust funds ran dry. Another third correctly answered that benefits would be reduced, but nearly half of that group estimated the bite would be 50 percent or more.
If the shortfall did in fact spell doom for Social Security, “then the trend of early claiming [would] make some rational sense,” Eskovitz says. But even “under the extreme worst-case scenario,” he notes, benefits would be reduced but not eliminated.