The Case Against Waiting Until 70 · July 1, 2026. Watch the recording ↓ Watch the recording ↓
Watch Justin Fitzpatrick make the case that delaying Social Security to 70 should not be the automatic default. When delaying pays, when it quietly costs the client, and how to make claiming a plan-level decision rather than a break-even calculation. Worked through live in Income Lab.
Recorded live on July 1, 2026 · 63 minutes · The last several minutes are live Q&A.
Most of the advice says delay to 70 by default. Justin's case is that the number driving that advice rests on a hidden assumption, that the difference is smaller than the headlines suggest, and that clients who want to claim early are often responding to real risks worth taking seriously. Worked through live in Income Lab.
The case for delay usually assumes a zero discount rate: a dollar at 90 counts the same as a dollar at 62. Add a realistic rate and the break-even shifts earlier, and the lifetime differences are smaller than the headlines suggest.
Delaying pulls larger withdrawals from the portfolio in the bridge years, which magnifies sequence-of-return risk. Add policy risk (the projected 2033 shortfall) and the fact that a dollar is worth more in the go-go years, and claiming early is often rational.
Claiming coordinates with portfolio withdrawals, taxes, and survivor and spousal benefits. The Social Security Optimizer shows the cloud of near-optimal claiming ages so the decision fits the client, not a rule of thumb.
The last several minutes are Q&A. This page is the permanent recording, open to share with colleagues.
Search for when to claim Social Security and you will find a wall of articles that land in the same place: wait until 70. The classic approach behind that advice is narrow. It compares the benefit you would receive at 62, at 67, and at 70, multiplies by the number of years you expect to live, and picks the age that maximizes expected lifetime benefits. Run that way, the math usually points to delay. Justin opened by naming the deeper issue: retirement planning is not a benefit-maximization exercise, it is about helping a client turn the resources and the time they have into the best life they can. Social Security claiming is one decision inside that larger goal, not a puzzle to be solved in isolation.
He is also skeptical of rules of thumb in general. Particular plans for particular people beat a blanket default. And when clients say they want to claim early, which they very often do, the useful move is not to label them irrational, but to assume they may be responding to something real. A lot of Justin's talk was about taking those reasons seriously.
The one place the session went into the math was the discount rate, the interest rate you use to value future dollars against present ones. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in ten years, because you can spend it now, because tomorrow is uncertain, and because you could invest it in the meantime. The case for delaying to 70 quietly assumes that rate is zero: a dollar at 90 is treated as exactly equal to a dollar at 62. Under that assumption, and a long enough life, delaying produces more total benefits.
Change the assumption and the conclusion moves. Apply even a modest real discount rate, on the order of 5%, and the break-even flips so that claiming earlier comes out ahead. In Justin's example, a 67-year-old choosing between roughly $3,000 a month now and about $3,720 a month at 70 sees the advantage swing to the earlier claim once a discount rate is in play. Just as important, the differences are not enormous to begin with, on the order of ten to thirty thousand dollars across a twenty-plus-year horizon, and they rest on an assumption no one can verify: how long the client will live. That modest, uncertain edge is what gives an advisor permission to weigh everything else.
Social Security does not exist in a vacuum, and this is where the case for delay tends to break down. To delay, a client usually has to pull more from the portfolio in the bridge years. If markets fall early in retirement, those extra withdrawals magnify losses and can do permanent damage, the classic sequence-of-return risk. Justin's co-author Derek Tharp made exactly this point in the Wall Street Journal, and when a prominent economist responded that a retiree could always keep working, borrow from siblings, downsize, or move in with their kids to avoid selling stocks, he rather made the point for them: those "alternatives" are far worse than simply claiming a little earlier. Claiming early also tends to leave more invested, so in good markets the early claimant can come out ahead too. It is not only about downturns.
Two more risks round out the case. Policy risk is real and clients want it addressed directly: on current projections the trust fund reaches a shortfall around 2033, after which the program could pay roughly 77% of scheduled benefits, an across-the-board cut of about 23% if nothing changes. History says Social Security does get changed, usually with tax changes taking effect immediately and benefit reductions grandfathered with a transition, but the uncertainty is exactly why some clients prefer a bird in the hand. And finally there is spending optionality. Money is not worth the same at every age. A dollar of guaranteed, easy-to-spend Social Security income in the early, active years often buys more life than the same dollar preserved for late old age, and claiming early tends to keep portfolio value intact, which is real flexibility for a new roof, a family need, or a once-in-a-lifetime trip. You cannot take an advance on Social Security; you can draw from a portfolio.
The session was not one-sided. There are solid reasons to delay, and Justin walked through the biggest ones. Survivor benefits are often decisive: a survivor benefit is keyed to the deceased spouse's actual benefit amount, so a higher-earning spouse who delays is effectively buying a larger, inflation-adjusted income for a survivor who may collect it for fifteen or twenty years. Taxes can also favor delay, for instance when large early Roth conversions or other early income would pull more of the benefit into taxability. Spousal benefits, by contrast, do not grow after full retirement age, so waiting until 70 to collect a spousal benefit is essentially never worth it. And delay credits, the roughly 8% bump for waiting between 67 and 70, are real but frequently misunderstood: they are more like a living benefit on an annuity than an 8% investment return, they are simple rather than compounded, and Social Security's guarantee and inflation adjustment are genuine advantages. The point is not that early always wins. It is that the reasons cut both ways, and the right answer is the client's, not a slogan's.
The back half of the session moved into the software, where Justin showed how to have this conversation with a real client. The Social Security tools surface a whole cloud of claiming strategies that land within a few percent of the theoretical maximum, which makes the "one right age" framing hard to sustain. From there he layered in the considerations that actually matter: a stress test that shows how claiming age interacts with portfolio outcomes through good and bad markets, an opportunity-cost toggle set against expected return, and a future-benefit-cut model where you can set the reduction date and percentage to address policy risk head-on. Each one tends to widen the range of reasonable claiming ages and move it earlier. The result is not a verdict handed down to the client, but a conversation that validates their concerns and lands on a strategy they are comfortable with. For advisors new to the platform, the section below is the fastest way to get up to speed, and a walkthrough on your own client numbers is one click away.
From the live session, with a little more detail than there was time for on the call.
Only under a specific assumption. The case for delay usually values future dollars at a zero discount rate, treating a dollar at 90 as equal to a dollar at 62. Apply a realistic real discount rate and the break-even shifts earlier. Even then the lifetime differences are modest, roughly ten to thirty thousand dollars over a twenty-plus-year horizon, and they depend on an unknowable input: longevity. Once you also account for sequence-of-return risk, policy risk, and the fact that money is worth more in the early years, "optimal" stops being a single age.
They pull in different directions. A survivor benefit is keyed to the deceased spouse's actual benefit amount, so a higher-earning spouse who delays buys a larger, inflation-adjusted income for a survivor who might collect it for fifteen or twenty years. That is often the strongest reason to delay. A spousal benefit, by contrast, is keyed to the primary insurance amount and does not grow after full retirement age, so waiting until 70 to take a spousal benefit is essentially never worthwhile. Note also that file-and-suspend and restricted application are no longer available, so the older two-step spousal strategies no longer apply.
Not in the way clients often hear it. The roughly 8% increase for delaying between 67 and 70 is a bigger lifetime benefit, more like a living benefit on an annuity than an 8% return on an investment, and it is simple rather than compounded, so it works out closer to seven-point-something. It is genuinely valuable, and Social Security's guarantee and inflation adjustment are real advantages worth weighing. It just is not comparable to an investment return, and treating it as one overstates the case for delay.
You model it explicitly rather than hand-waving it. In Income Lab you can turn on a future benefit cut, set the reduction date and percentage, and default to the current projection, roughly a 23% across-the-board cut around 2033 if nothing changes. Clients want this risk addressed directly. History suggests tax changes tend to take effect immediately while benefit reductions are usually grandfathered with a transition period, but nobody knows for certain, which is part of why some clients prefer to claim earlier.
Often it is the reverse. To delay, a client typically withdraws more from the portfolio in the bridge years, and if markets fall early those extra withdrawals magnify losses through sequence-of-return risk. Claiming earlier tends to leave the portfolio larger, which preserves real optionality, and in strong markets the early claimant can come out ahead as well. Income Lab's stress test shows this on the client's own numbers, across good and bad market paths, so it is a conversation rather than an assertion.
You are watching it. This page is the permanent recording of the July 1, 2026 session, and registrants also received an email link after the webinar. You are welcome to share this page with colleagues; the recording is open, with no second registration required.
A few people on the live call were brand new to the platform. If that's you, this is the fastest path from "I have a login" to "I can run the Social Security conversation."
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Justin co-founded Income Lab in 2018 to close a gap he saw across the industry: advisors lacked a way to give retirees a concrete, trustworthy answer to "how much can I spend?" He built the risk-based guardrails methodology now used by thousands of advisors, replacing probability-of-success scores with a specific spending number and dynamic adjustment rules that update automatically as conditions change.
Before Income Lab, Justin spent a decade at Jackson leading advanced planning teams and developing financial technology. He also spent seven years in academia, teaching at MIT, Harvard, Queen Mary University of London, and UCLA. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from MIT, a CFA Charter, and CFP certification.
His research and writing have appeared in Kitces.com, ThinkAdvisor, AdvisorPerspectives, and Financial Planning Magazine, and he speaks regularly at the CFP Board Research Colloquium and at NAPFA and FPA conferences.
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Practitioner-led. Real scenarios and working math, not a product tour.
Read the playbooks Justin referenced during the session.
Claiming ages, spousal and survivor coordination, and the decision framework, end to end.
→ The CritiqueThe case against delay-by-default, with the scenarios where it breaks down.
→ In the ProductWhere Income Lab compares claiming strategies inside the full plan, not in isolation.
→ AI ParaplannerThe Income Lab Pro paraplanner that surfaces tax and claiming moves at every stage.
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