The Social Security Claiming Mistakes That Cost Retirees the Most.

The most common social security claiming mistakes are three: claiming too early and locking in a permanently smaller check, treating the decision as a solo one when your spouse's survivor benefit hangs on it, and ignoring how much of your benefit gets taxed. Each can quietly cost tens of thousands of dollars over a retirement, and most of them can't be undone once you file. The good news is that all three are avoidable if you see them coming.

The video below walks through the same three, and the sections after it put every figure in 2026 terms and add the shadow taxes that ride along with the third one.

▶ Video: youtube.com/watch?v=EElg_jYg-a4, “Stop Making These 3 Social Security Mistakes (Before It’s Too Late)”

Watch: Patrick Shope on the three claiming mistakes that cost retirees the most.

Mistake 1: Claiming benefits at 62 just because you can

This is the most expensive one I see, and it's usually made on emotion. You're tired of working, or you're worried the system won't be there, so you file the month you turn 62. Here's the thing: that reduction is permanent. It follows every payment for the rest of your life, and every cost-of-living raise gets applied to the smaller number.

Let me show you the math. Say your full retirement age benefit would be $3,000 a month. Full retirement age is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later. Claim at 62 and you're cut by roughly 30%, down to about $2,100. Wait past 67 and your benefit grows 8% a year, simple, up to age 70. Three years of that is 24% more, or about $3,720.

The spread between 62 and 70 in this example is about $1,600 a month, for life. Think about a man we'll call Robert whose full retirement age benefit is $2,500. File at 62 and he's down to about $1,750, or $750 less a month. Over just ten years that's $90,000 he never sees, and it grows with each COLA.

Now, I'm not telling everyone to wait. If you're in poor health or you genuinely need the income, claiming early can be the right call. What bothers me is watching someone give up 30% forever to avoid drawing $40,000 from an IRA for a couple of years. The fix is to build yourself a bridge: draw from savings or work part-time so you're not forced to file the day you're eligible. If you want the full framework, I laid it out in when to actually claim Social Security.

Mistake 2: Treating it as your decision when it's really a household one

This is the mistake that costs a surviving spouse the most, and it's the one couples almost never run the numbers on. You're always entitled to the higher of your own benefit or a spousal benefit, but Social Security doesn't hand you the bigger one automatically. You have to know to ask.

Take a couple we'll call Gary and Sarah. Sarah worked part-time for years while raising kids, so her own benefit at full retirement age is about $1,200 a month. Gary's is $3,000. Sarah can claim a spousal benefit of half of Gary's, or $1,500. That's $300 more a month, $3,600 a year, just from knowing the rule exists.

Here's why it matters so much down the road. When one spouse dies, the survivor keeps the larger of the two checks, not both. So the higher earner's benefit becomes the floor the survivor lives on for the rest of her life. If Gary passes first, Sarah steps up from her $1,200 to Gary's $3,000. That's nearly $22,000 more a year for as long as she lives.

Now flip it. Say the higher earner claims early. His benefit at 70 would have been $3,500, but he files at 62 and locks in about $1,976. When he dies, his widow inherits that reduced $1,976, not the $3,500. The gap is about $1,524 a month, and over 20 years of a survivor's remaining life that's more than $350,000 the household never gets back. That is the heart of what I call the widow's penalty: one income disappears, and often the smaller check is the one left standing.

One more piece people miss: if you were married at least ten years and are now divorced, you may still claim on your ex-spouse's record, even if they've remarried. It doesn't cost them a dime. Before you file, find out what you're entitled to on every record that applies to you.

Mistake 3: Underestimating how much of your benefit gets taxed

Plenty of people retire believing Social Security isn't taxable, or that they'll be in too low a bracket for it to matter. Then the first tax return lands and the surprise costs them.

Here's how it actually works. The IRS looks at your provisional income, which is your other income plus any tax-exempt interest plus half of your benefit. For a married couple, once provisional income clears $32,000 some of your benefit becomes taxable, and above $44,000 up to 85% can be. For a single filer those lines are $25,000 and $34,000. Notice the words "up to." That 85% is a ceiling, not an automatic result. These thresholds aren't indexed to inflation, so more retirees drift over them every year.

Picture a couple we'll call Carol and Bruce collecting $4,000 a month in combined benefits, or $48,000 a year. They also pull $30,000 from a traditional IRA to cover expenses. That withdrawal, plus half their benefit, puts their provisional income well past the $44,000 line, so about $40,800 of their $48,000 benefit becomes taxable. That's a lot of taxable income they never budgeted for.

And the tax bracket isn't the whole bill. Higher income also pushes toward IRMAA, the surcharge on Medicare premiums. In 2026 that line sits at $218,000 of modified adjusted gross income for a married couple ($109,000 single), and it's a cliff: a dollar over prices the whole year at the higher tier, which can add roughly $2,300 to a couple's Medicare cost. Social Security's calculators won't warn you about any of this, which is one of the bigger mistakes people make with the online estimators.

The fix is to plan the whole income picture, not one piece at a time. In practice that often means doing Roth conversions in your early 60s, before you claim, while your income is lower. Converting some traditional money then shrinks the required withdrawals later that would otherwise shove your provisional income over these lines. You spend down taxable accounts first, keep provisional income calm in the early years, and let the Roth grow.

Why these three are worth getting right

Social Security is the only retirement income most people have that adjusts for inflation on its own and can't drop in a market crash. That's exactly why the claiming choices are so unforgiving. File too early and you shrink the inflation-protected foundation for life. Ignore the spousal side and you leave a survivor short. Skip the tax planning and you hand back a chunk of what you fought to maximize.

None of this says wait until 70, coordinate perfectly, and convert every dollar. It says decide with the whole picture in front of you, because these calls are permanent. The single best next step is knowing the exact lines your decision runs into. Our 2026 numbers sheet lists the full retirement age, the delayed-credit math, the taxation thresholds, and the IRMAA tiers on one page so you can see where you stand before you file.

The claiming date isn't really about the year you turn 62 or 67 or 70. It's about the income you and your spouse will live on for the rest of both your lives. Get that framing right and most of these mistakes solve themselves.

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