Social Security Administration Goes Digitial

For years, the Social Security Administration has mailed out annual statements to inform you of your benefits upon retirement, disability or death.  It has been a great service to have this mailed regularly so that you can stay up to date on what you could expect under the three different benefit formulas. 

"Times they are a changin'' though, because the Social Security Administration has taken the statements online in an effort to save millions of dollars a year (technically the savings are expected to be approximately $70 million annually).  In order to access the site you need to go to the Social Security Administration website and register (www.ssa.gov/mystatement/). It is a fairly straightforward process but creating a workable Username and Password that you can remember is definitely the hardest part (I recently registered myself).  Apparently, you can’t use any part of your name or Social Security number in either.

With that being said, we recommend that you visit the Social Security website by clicking on the following link and creating an account.  We recommend it for several reasons:

1)    It is good to do it now when you are thinking about it and remember.  Let's be honest we all live busy lives so doing something now is better than putting it off indefinitely.

2)    Everyone with an earnings history has an account so there is some concern that your account could be registered with someone else (i.e., stolen).   This is just an informational site so if someone does gain access to it for any reason they can't start your benefits or make changes.  Technically all the information that they could gain from the site, they would already need in order to steal your account. So realistically there is nothing gained for someone to do this, but it is a concern that can be alleviated by simply registering your account now.   

3)    We like to see these statements periodically so it will be good to have in advance rather than scrambling to get them.

4)    It is good to spot errors as they occur rather than not seeing them for many years in the future.  This allows you to  not only more accurately catch errors but should make it easier and less stressful to correct than trying to do so when you need them updated. 

Due to the complexity of the username and password to access the site, we do recommend writing or down or keeping it in a secure location.