“Baby boomers seem to want to front-load their retirement with more income early in life so they can enjoy themselves,” LaCasse says. “That should really be done off of assets they have accumulated, not Social Security.”  

Conventional wisdom states that Americans should wait as long as possible to take Social Security to maximize their monthly benefit.

“It makes sense to wait if you can afford it,” Heather Evans, senior vice president for wealth management and with Merrill Lynch’s Evans-Candelori Group in Vienna, Va. “That way you get the greatest amount of supplement to your income. A lot of people file at 62 and take a 25 percent discount on their benefits. As life expectancy increases, the risk of outliving your money is too great to ignore and waiting until you can maximize benefits at 70 years old makes more sense.”

However, the math changes for families with lower life expectancy or fewer savings.

“I look at longevity issues,” Christopher Hensley, president of the Houston First Financial Group, says. “If they have cancer or a chronic illness that runs in their family, if they have parents that have passed away at a younger age, that might be a situation where we look at filing earlier.”

While there are a bevy of free online tools to determine claiming strategies, most don’t consider the personal factors that a human advisor can use to enhance Social Security’s usefulness.

“Advisors should approach Social Security by learning more about how to coordinate benefits as if it was a duty to their clients rather than an extra burden that they won’t get paid for,” Hensley says. “Education and knowledge about these programs is what sets us apart from the other advisors out there.”

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