Question: Will Social Security reduce my benefits if I keep working? By how much? How do I find out? I haven’t started collecting yet.
Answer: The Social Security Administration won’t reduce your monthly benefit if you continue working past your full retirement age, which is 67 for people born in 1960 and later. However, it might temporarily reduce your monthly payment if you claim Social Security benefits before your full retirement age, continue working and exceed an earnings cap, which changes each year, according to the SSA website. You would receive any money withheld due to excess earnings after you reach full retirement age, it says. “Beginning with the month you reach full retirement age, your earnings no longer reduce your benefits, no matter how much you earn,” it says. Learn more about the “earnings test” at 808ne.ws/4do4NEQ, where you can figure out how this rule would affect you by using a calculator linked from the web page.
Meanwhile, AARP is hosting a telephone town hall today with U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and AARP Government Affairs Director Tom Nicholls, to talk about the future of Social Security, which is a major source of income for Hawaii retirees, funded by payroll taxes they have paid for decades.
The hourlong forum, scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m., will include a question-and-answer portion, according to a news release from AARP, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people 50 and older. People who have participated in previous AARP telephone town halls will be called to join the forum, while others can call in toll-free at 833-305-0175 when it begins or watch it on the AARP Hawai‘i Facebook page, the news release said. For more information, go to aarp.org/local.
“AARP is a fierce defender of Social Security and encourages everyone to ask Congress to act sooner rather than later to ensure that benefits will not be cut in 2035,” Keali‘i Lopez, AARP Hawaii state director, said in the news release, which noted that today is Social Security’s 89th anniversary.
Q: About a month ago I got a letter supposedly from Ticketmaster with a code to sign up for credit monitoring because of a hack. I don’t remember ever using Ticketmaster, so I thought it was a scam letter and threw it away, but now my sister says it’s real and I need the code. What do I do?
A: Call the Ticketmaster incident response line at 800-653-1840 for assistance. Recipients of the July 17 letter have 90 days from that date to enroll in a year’s free credit monitoring offered after the data breach, which affected hundreds of millions of Ticketmaster customers. The company sells tickets for concerts, sporting events and much more. The notice of the hack did not say that only recent customers were affected, so perhaps you used the service long ago and simply don’t recall.
According to Ticketmaster, the company discovered unauthorized activity on a cloud database hosted by a third-party provider. The database contained information about some customers who bought tickets to events in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, including their email addresses, phone numbers, encrypted credit card information and other details.
Affected customers were notified by email or U.S. mail. “If you are not contacted, we do not believe your sensitive information was involved,” the company says on it website. This answers a question from another reader, who has used Ticketmaster and wondered why he never received a letter notifying him of the hack.
Mahalo
Many thanks to the young guy who caught up with me outside the Aina Haina post office to let me know that I had dropped a $20 bill. I appreciate his honesty. — A reader
Write to Kokua Line at Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., Suite 7-500, Honolulu, HI 96813; call 808-529-4773; or email kokualine@staradvertiser.com.
