“Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of workers are making arguably highly inappropriate collection decisions – decisions that significantly reduce their lifetime Social Security benefits and, consequently, their lifetime spending.
“We find that virtually all U.S. workers aged 45-62 would benefit from waiting until age 65 to collect.
“More than 90 percent would benefit from waiting until age 70. Yet only 10.2 percent do so, given our assumption that retirement-benefit collection begins at retirement. These age decisions are robust to alternate assumed maximum ages of life.
“Even assuming an unrealistically low maximum age of 85, three-quarters of workers would do best by waiting until age 70.”
