Fortunately existing benefits continue to get paid, though there are some negative consequences to social security programs if the GOP can't manage to pass a budget and the government shuts down. I added a new guide here:

ssa.tools/guides/gover...

Note these also take into account gender if provided or just average based on cohort tables if gender is not set. However, the gender difference is relatively small compared to the outliers on the health sliders so those are a more noticeable effect.

The latest prototype has sliders that lets the user adjust the life expectancy of both recipients in real time to get an approximate idea of how that might affect probabilities of different survival ages and thus filing strategies.

Still work in progress / not yet launched. Always love feedback!

Here's the same data, but shown as an age instead of a date:

What do you think? Is this a useful way to increase someone's understanding of the decision space?

Useful beyond just a single recommended filing date based on assumptions (such as actuarial distribution or fixed age)?

You can visually see where the lower earner (Chris in this scenario) often wants to file at 62 years old while the higher earner (Alex in this scenario) wants to wait until a bit later, possibly as late as 70.

The rows and columns represent possible ages of death. The width of each row / column reflects the actuarial probability of dying at that age. While the table shows the optimal filing age for that combination.

I've been playing around with a visualization of the best Social Security filing date pair displayed over all possible ages of death. The idea being to give users a clearer picture of how the filing age decision works.

The "BETA" tag has come off of the survivor benefits section on ssa.tools. I'm fairly confident in the implementation.

If you haven't seen it yet, try the demo link and scroll to near the bottom section. You can try it with your own data, but you'll need to enter both yourself and your spouse.

This Mother's Day, give your mom what every mother wants - a link to help them calculate their social security retirement benefits: ssa.tools

With 2024 taxes filed (hopefully), it's a great time to check if your new earnings data has updated at SSA.gov. Each additional year can change your benefit calculation, especially if it replaces a lower-earning year in your top 35. See exactly how at ssa.tools - takes just minutes to check.

If you've tried to access Social Security services recently, you may have encountered longer wait times, website outages, or difficulty reaching representatives. These challenges stem from changes implemented by the Trump administration in 2025.

Learn more at ssa.tools/guides/agenc...

To the employees of SSA, thank you for your service. I'm sad to see what the current administration has been doing to public servants across the nation.

You may be wondering if ssa.tools has been updated to support the changes to WEP and GPO from the Social Security Fairness Act.

In fact, ssa.tools never had support for the WEP / GPO adjustments, it was an open bug to implement. This bill effectively closed the bug. ssa.tools is up to date.

This is the new social media account for ssa.tools, the social security calculator. Follow here for updates.