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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFewer Americans seeing crucial Social Security document amid budget cuts
It is one of the most important retirement documents you will ever receive, but fewer Americans are reviewing their Social Security benefit statement nowadays due to cost-cutting and a government push to online services that is falling short.
Until about a decade ago, all workers eligible for Social Security received a paper statement in the mail that provided useful projections of their benefits at various ages, along with reminders on the availability of disability benefits and Medicare enrollment information.
But the Social Security Administration (SSA) decided in 2010 to save money by eliminating most mailings of benefit statements. Instead, we would all be encouraged to obtain this information online.
It is now abundantly clear that this is not working out.
The number of workers accessing their statements online has been just a fraction of those who once were reached by paper statements. And the cost-benefit tradeoff is poor.
Forty-two million Americans have created online accounts with the SSA since they were first offered seven years ago, the agency says, compared with the 155 million paper statements that were mailed in 2010, before the cost-cutting began. Meanwhile, the number of online account-holders who accessed their statements fell dramatically in fiscal 2018, from 96 percent to 43 percent, according to a report issued in February by the SSAs Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/fewer-americans-seeing-crucial-social-security-document-amid-budget-cuts/ar-BBWf3vG?li=BBnbfcN
If you have not signed up for access to your Social Security account I suggest you do. The URL is https://secure.ssa.gov/SiView.action
They do a pretty good job of screening to make sure you're legit. When signing up you get asked quite a few questions which only you should know the answers to.
sinkingfeeling
(51,279 posts)just got an email from SSA today reminding me to log in and review my account information.
W_HAMILTON
(7,813 posts)...and then went back to check it, and maybe forgot the password, and there was some big hullaboo after that. Either it locked me out and I needed to jump through hurdles to get it unlocked, or it was going to snail mail me something to verify my identity, etc. I can't remember what the problem was, but it essentially kept me from checking my payroll history.
I'm going to try to access it again after reading the story and see if I can get into it now...
dweller
(23,562 posts)I attempted to sign up for Medicare online, went thru the process only to get to a step where I was told I could not open an account with my Soc sec # , and to call help desk, so I did... waited 55 mins or so to get a voice who couldn't say why other than a 'block' had been put on my # ... transferred to another voice to help (35 min wait) and told the same thing, so had to ask for telephone appt 4 days later... got the call, a case worker who took the info to set up Medicare .. but will have to show in person to get online setup , which is on my to do list...
I'm considering going ahead and applying for Soc sec and going to pt work to supplement it for at least another year, but I need to get the figures from them to make a final decision about that. not sure I can live on it, but we'll see...
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