Your Social Security statement is a document that informs you about your prior work earnings, and lays out what that translates into for future potential benefits. These statements used to be mailed annually to everyone, but currently they are only mailed annually to those who are:

• 60+ years old
  AND
• not yet taking Social Security
  AND
• do not have an online mySocialSecurity account.

These Social Security statements have looked like this for a long time. However, there is a recent change to these statements that is not yet reflected in their sample statement. It’s a space savings, but it’s got two non-trivial downsides.

The first downside is the inability to check if the records are correct. When everyone used to be mailed their statement annually, we were encouraged to verify that every year’s earnings were correctly recorded. Then statements went away. Then statements came back for those approaching Social Security eligibility ages. Now, decades prior to the current one are all collapsed into a single line, a single pot of money. For example, on a statement today that goes through the year 2020, work year’s 2001-2010 are all collapsed into a single line. And 1991-2000 are a single line.

The second downside is that all of the financial planning calculators, whether for the DIYer or the financial professional, require the year-by-year earnings to be entered. Which means you have to have that data that way, you can’t just divide your summed single pot by 10 and report that in each year.

Now in order to get the individual years, you will have to get an account with mySocialSecurity, which means you won’t receive any more printed statements even as you are approaching claiming ages.

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