Is There Anything Worth Knowing About Social Security for a Young Lawyer? Surprisingly, yes.

Years ago, my mom asked me a few questions about that endlessly thrilling topic, Social Security. I had no answers. So, humoring her and trying to be a good son, I bought and read Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security, by Laurence Kotlikoff, Philip Moeller, and Paul Solman. I surprised myself by reading all 306 pages, cover to cover, with interest. The fact that I did this while working at a law firm (yes, this was “pleasure” reading) largely explains why I do what I do for a living now.

At times, reading about Social Security’s arcane rules was a slog. But I survived, and I learned important things about a program I long regarded as (1) a concern for old people exclusively, and (2) a fairly meager benefit. Turns out, there are a lot of things worth knowing about Social Security, even early in your career and even in high-earning professions like law. Here are some of them.

Social Security rewards earning a good salary

This seems obvious, but it’s worth stating: If you spend a lifetime earning good money in covered employment, Social Security rewards you. Higher earners pay more into the system during their working years, and they also get more back from it in retirement. A couple who each earned above Social Security’s maximum taxable earnings ($184,500 in 2026) for 35 years—impressive, but not that uncommon for two-lawyer households—would receive roughly $5,181 per person per month at age 70 in today’s dollars. That’s about $124,000 combined annually, adjusted for inflation as you age.

The implications are profound. That’s $124,000, indexed to inflation, coming to you annually in a period of your life when day care, camps, groceries, and school have stopped bleeding you dry. Plus, God willing, your mortgage is paid off, and the kids are through college and no longer the Bank of Mom and Dad’s regular customers. $124,000 a year is money that compounds entirely separately from your portfolio—a floor, essentially, that you’ve already purchased through 35 years of maximum contributions. Your ostensibly humble Social Security checks could fund that second home, serious philanthropic work, or simply sit idle while your other investments continue to grow untouched for another 15 or 20 years.

Social Security benefits are calculated based on your thirty-five highest-earning working years

Because Social Security averages your thirty-five highest-earning years, there is, intuitively enough, real value in having thirty-five high-earning years—ideally at or above the maximum taxable earnings threshold. But, surprisingly to some, the system caps out: one person earning $184,501 and another earning $1,184,501 receive the same benefit.

And here’s a subtler point: if you worked 25 years at peak earnings but only 25 years total, the other ten years count as zeros. This substantially lowers your payout. Many lawyers who retire early or transition in and out of practice aren’t thinking about this until it’s too late. If you’re serious about the maximum benefit, you need the full 35 years of well-paid work experience. Encouragingly, as I’ve noted elsewhere on Unreasonably Prudent, the lawyer’s “golden mean” in the profession—nice colleagues, sane hours, steady work, decent pay—might be right around a $180,000 salary. So, you don’t have to destroy yourself in a meat grinder firm to capture Social Security’s maximum benefit. Steady work right around the “golden mean” is sufficient.

Age 70 is the magic number for taking Social Security benefits

If you can afford to wait, claim at 70. Your benefit at 70 is 77% higher, after inflation, than your benefit at 62. This comes from Delayed Retirement Credits—monthly increases of roughly 0.7% for each month you wait past your full retirement age (67 for most of us born in 1960 or later). The credits stop accruing at 70, so there’s nothing to gain by waiting longer.

Though the situation is improving, many people still take Social Security early. Don’t be one. Plan ahead.

For years, early claiming was a sort of national epidemic. I was shocked to read in Get What’s Yours that, on average, a whopping 41.5% of men took their benefits right at 62 (the earliest age for claiming Social Security retirement benefits) from 2009-2012. Some of this could have been forced early retirements, producing people who can’t afford to wait. But I imagine a lot of it, too, was simply not understanding the power of delayed gratification vis-à-vis Social Security.

Encouragingly, however, much has changed in the last decade-plus. Fewer people are choosing to claim early. By 2024, that number had dropped to 22%. I imagine people are realizing that early claiming is expensive; they receive a permanently smaller monthly check for life. And even if they’re forced into early retirement, I suspect more of these people now understand that delaying Social Security is optimal and are doing their best to delay, despite the adverse circumstances.

But you can only afford to wait like this if you have the means. The way to ensure you’re in that position of strength is disciplined savings throughout your working life: maxing out your 401(k), IRAs, backdoor Roths, any tax-advantaged account available to you. These funds bridge the gap between your retirement and age 70, making you comfortably unreliant on what is, in the end, government largesse. Indeed, it’s the same boring personal finance stuff, day in and day out, that also makes you wake up one day and say, huh…I guess I’m rich now, aren’t I?

Despite the doom and gloom, Social Security will endure in one form or another. But high-earning lawyers should prepare for the worst.

The belief that Social Security will vanish is old. In The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need, which I highly recommend reading, author Andrew Tobias cited a 1994 poll in which young people thought they’d sooner see a UFO than collect Social Security. And yet, the program endures.

Will it look the same? I doubt it. Congress could raise the income ceiling subject to taxation, means-test benefits for wealthier retirees, or quietly re-index how benefits grow. The full retirement age, already pushed from 65 to 67 once, could be pushed again. Benefits might be reduced for those drawing substantial income from other sources. More drastic fixes may be necessary. Politicians and administrators will decide, and many of the people making those calls haven’t been born yet.

Though we don’t necessarily know these decision-makers, we can already be certain of an important force shaping their decisions: the political will to preserve Social Security for the nurse, the teacher, and elderly retiree is bottomless. Not so much for high-earning lawyers, and they should plan to be in any reformer’s crosshairs.

My mom has a promise. We have a probability.

My mom asked her questions because she was deciding when to file. The answers were knowable: the rules were written, the checks were coming, and the only real question was timing. My generation might not get that same certainty. I can't tell you what the benefit formula will look like in 2060, and neither can anyone else. What I can tell you is that my baby boomer mom is owed a promise. Millennials and everyone behind us are holding something closer to a probability.

So, I treat it as one. I do my best under the current rules—I believe I’ll get something—but I assume big, unknowable changes are coming. My expectations are accordingly low: I consider Social Security a nice windfall with an assumed haircut attached, not a significant piece of my retirement plan.

The happy accident in all of this is that the career that earns you the maximum benefit—thirty-five working years above the taxable ceiling—is the same career that, paired with solid but unspectacular saving and investing, builds a retirement that doesn't need the benefit. Paradoxically, the work required to qualify for the government's largest check produces the opportunities to save and invest that make that check unnecessary.

So, I’ve settled on a Washington-wary plan, and I’ll let Social Security be whatever Congress decides it will be. If my check arrives in full at 70, wonderful; I'll put it toward my ski house. If it arrives smaller, later, or not at all, I'll have built a solid retirement anyway. My mom got a promise. I’d rather not need one.