Help me understand how to calculate social security benefits

Factual Questions
1

Several years ago, I used the Social Security Administration’s “anypia” tool:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/anypia/download.html

I tried using it again recently, but it’s inscrutable and has really abysmal documentation, and I can’t figure out how to use it now. So I looked around and found this online tool:

Completely anonymous - you don’t need to create an account or provide any personal identifying info. Just paste in your earnings history from your official SSA earnings statement:

https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/statement.html

and it does the math, spitting out a few numbers and a nice interactive plot to help you understand what’s going on.

But I’m puzzled as to why, in my case, it’s ignoring earnings from all years prior to 2006. The procedure, AIUI, is supposed to be this:

  • each year of earnings gets multiplied by an * index factor.
  • The 35 years of highest indexed earnings get summed, then divided by 35, and then divided by 12 to get your * Average Indexed Monthly Earnings (AIME).
  • The Primary Insurance Amount (PIA), the monthly stipend you’d get if you were currently 67 years old and filed for benefits this year, is calculated * as a function of your AIME. The formula includes a couple of “bend” points in the curve so that the rate of increase of your PIAA falls off as your AIME increases.

My earnings prior to 1999 are slim to none, as I was an impoverished grad student prior to that year. My indexed earnings from 1999-2005 are in the same general ballpark as my earnings after 2006, but for some reason the ssa.tools calculator is ignoring them. 2006-2026 is only 20 years, so shouldn’t the 1999-2005 years be included in the calculation? Even with those, it would only be 28 years of earnings.

The max allowable PIA is only about $4,000, and I’m not bumping into that limit. I’ve got all of this math in an Excel sheet, and if I drop the 1999-2005 years, I get the same result as the SSA.tools calculator. I just want to understand why the calculation should ignore those years.

2

AFAIK / IME your understanding of the procedure is correct.

Without seeing your report and thereby doxxing yourself at least some, we can’t say how you’re coming to the conclusion it’s ignoring those years.

It makes more sense that you’re misunderstanding something about the output than they’re skipping years. Perhaps their own explanation of their output is incorrect or just sux as English prose and leaves you with a misled impression.

3

I figured out the problem. I was copying the earnings record from my Social Security Statement (a downloadable PDF file), rather than directly from the SSA website. the PDF file aggregates my earnings for the ‘80s into a single line item, with the “Work Year” listed as “1981-1990”. Same sort of thing for the ‘90s, and then again for 2001-2005, though I don’t know why they aggregate just those five years instead of the whole ‘00s decade. It turns out that the ssa.tools calculator doesn’t know what to do with those any line that doesn’t start with a plain four-digit date, which is why was ignoring everything prior to 2006.

On the SSA website, there’s a link that says “Review your full earnings record now”, and that takes me a full table of year-by-year earnings going to back to the first year in the ‘80s when I had a paper route. If I copy/paste that into the ssa.tools calculator, it properly recognizes all of those individual years of earnings and gives me the same result my spreadsheet gives me. So all’s well, just a user error.