Phush! Guess what? You can just assume that your Social Security checks will be what they will be and you can’t control their size. If so, you are wrong. There are many ways to increase these benefits, especially if retirement is not imminent.

For example, you can view your income statement held by the Social Security Administration — once you set up a “my social securityThis data is used to calculate your benefits, so make sure it’s correct. Here are three more effective ways to boost those benefits.

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1. Work at least 35 years

The formula Social Security uses to determine how much money to send you each month in retirement takes into account your income for the 35 years in which you earned the most (with each year’s income adjusted for inflation ). So if you only work, say, 28 years before retiring, there will be seven zeros factored into the equation, and that will result in a much smaller benefit amount than it could have been .

2. Working for more than 35 years

Also, obviously, the more you earn during your working life, the greater your benefits will be, to some extent. Let’s say you’ve worked for those 35 years and you’re considering quitting now, as you approach age 62, the earliest age at which you can claim your benefits. Well, if your early years involved a lot of part-time work or your earnings were low at the time, those low numbers will hurt your benefit check. It’s the same if you earned a reasonable and fairly average income in your first few years on the job, but are now earning much more than ever, even on an inflation-adjusted basis.

In these cases, you may be able to significantly increase your future benefits by working a few more years. For each additional year of work, the income for the year you earned the least will be excluded from the calculation. Remember, only your 35 best-earning years count.

You might even become very proactive about it and work aggressively to boost your income for a few years — perhaps by taking on a side job, getting a better-paying position, or moving into a more lucrative profession.

3. Delay the start of your benefit collection

Finally, another powerful benefit-increasing strategy is to delay the time when you begin to see the benefits. Each of us has afull retirement age” from which we can start collecting the full benefits to which we are entitled. For most of us, it’s 66, 67, or somewhere in between. But we can start collecting Social Security retirement benefits as early as age 62. The catch is that they will be smaller than if we started collecting later, but we will collect a lot more checks this way.

We could also delay the start of the collection of our benefits. For each year beyond full retirement age and up to age 70, our benefits will increase by approximately 8%. So, waiting 67 to 70 can increase our checks by 24%. Note, however, that if we delay, we will end up collecting fewer checks. The system is actually designed in such a way that it doesn’t matter when we start collecting if we live an average life.

Still, there are plenty of good reasons to delay, if we can. For starters, if we are healthy and have a decent chance of living longer than average lives, then we will come out on top. Also, if we are married and have the highest income in the family, it may make sense to maximize our benefits, because when one spouse dies, the other receives one or other of the benefits, whichever is higher — and that can really help the low-income spouse.

The final consideration is inflation — and the cost of living adjustments (COLAs) that Social Security recipients receive most years. The bigger your benefit, the bigger your annual increase will be.

He can pay for read about social security and make smart moves, now and later. You can end up with a more financially secure future if you do.

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