More than 70 million Americans depend on Social Security payments from the Social Security Administration (SSA) to keep their finances stable and keep them from facing most of the risks that come with being poor.
Even though it is not easy, there are set rules for how to organize these payments, and learning them will help you a lot in the long run. It does not matter if you think of yourself as an expert in them or not.
For a quick review of how they work, here it is. If you can not remember, now is the perfect time to learn about them so you can make better financial decisions in the future.
How are your Social Security payments planned?
There is no good reason to think about getting your Social Security benefits right away for every possible beneficiary that the SSA checks on every month.
Doing so would only make operational mistakes more likely or put too much stress on the systems of the different banks to handle a lot of transactions quickly so that Social Security payments can be sent out.
Problems will only happen when a person has to do the same thing over and over again within a tight time frame.
Because of this, the SSA has set up a basic set of rules to support an annual payment schedule. The payments are spread out over time, usually once a week.
The first rule is to get a list of all the beneficiaries and divide them in half by the date they started getting Social Security benefits. Their money is sent to them on the third of every month, even if they started the program before May 1997.
They would need more segmentation, though, if they started getting SSA payments after May 1997. The following things are true about their program.
The people who get Supplemental Security Income (SSI) will get their turn on the first of every month. The people who get Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) will get their turn based on their dates of birth.
Who in the beneficiary’s pool will receive their Social Security payments this time?
In this case, there is going to be one payment for the OASDI beneficiaries that started after May 1997, as the rules are defined as follows:
| Beneficiary’s Birth Date | Payment Wednesday of the Month |
| 1st to 10th | Second |
| 11th to 20th | Third |
| 21st to 31st | Fourth |
Because of this, on Wednesday, the 27th, all OASDI members who joined after May 1997 will get their money. On November 29th, SSI recipients will receive an extra payment. Because December 1st is a weekend, this is being moved up to avoid more trouble.
How can you be a member of Social Security and receive Social Security payments?
Getting these Social Security payments comes down to meeting the prerequisites for each program’s eligibility. Here are some guidelines regarding them:
- Retirement: You can obtain at least 40 Social Security credits by paying Social Security taxes, and you can reclaim them when you are 62 years old or older.
- Survivors: Your dependents can reclaim this benefit if you pass away and have contributed to the SSA before.
- Disability: Contributing at least 5 years in the past ten will qualify you for this stipend in case you are declared disabled or blind.
- SSI: If your assets are limited and your monthly earnings are less than $1,971.
Is there a way to know how much you will receive in your Social Security payments?
There is no reliable method to predict your Social Security payments, mainly if you are not a current SSA member. But you may get a sneak peek at the latest October numbers. According to them, the mean Social Security benefit values are:
- Retired program: $ 1,875.82
- Disability program: $ 1,404.75
- Survivor program: $ 1,509.29
- SSI: $ 697.50
