Let’s say you have someone who is not mentally compromised who lives at the margins and makes a living by odd jobs, begging, mooching or petty criminality and does not do any tax filing their entire life. Are they due any kind of social security or similar bennies when they get older and need income or medical assistance?
Nope. My brother was just like that and was entitled to nothing. Even though he had cancer, he was not eligible for SS disability because he never paid into it or worked enough quarters earning a real income.
Yes they can get Supplemental Security Assistance, Food Stamps and Medicaid.
In a simplistic nutshell, Social Security payments after a certain age are based upon the earnings for 40 years prior. The amount of earnings is based upon the reported income on the IRS tax return.
If any years’ earnings were not reported or filed, they are not included in the 40 year calculation. So if a drug dealer didn’t file any tax returns and didn’t get any reported income, he doesn’t have any Social Security basis and can’t get any disbursement.
It doesn’t even need to be ‘on the margins’. In my family, two uncles who took over the family farm never paid taxes (farm never made money according to younger uncle).
Eventually the younger, college educated one took a job in town for ten years. He gets Medicare and Social Security. Older brother gets nothing from SS, is on now on Medicaid and is living with his daughter. He exhausted proceeds from sale of farm on Medicare (very pricey if you never paid taxes) and nursing home.
I read a story about this woman who lived at Twin Oaks commune where like the OP describes, she paid no SS all her life. I guess income and expenses are shared and most people dont file. It then came time when she was in her 60’s and she had NO retirement or SS.
They count those years w/o income as a 0, but you can still get SS income if you earned in other years.
My understanding is that if you earned as an example 100k for 10 years, but never paid SS taxes any other time they would average that out and say that you earned an average of 25k a year, or $2100 a month and base your SS income on that $2100/month figure (which would be around 1k or so a month).
In addition to the points above about averaging (most of) your reported lifetime income there is a separate eligibility test for the basic (non-disability) SS benefit.
That threshold is 40 quarters = 10 total years’-worth of reported income. So somebody could pay into SS for 9-3/4ths years and still get zero. Once they paid in for 10 total years’-worth then they’d be eligible for the benefit based on their 35-year earnings history.
Now I’m curious about stay at home Mom’s who might never earn income, or file.
Do they get any coverage? I’m curious about the reasoning too! Aren’t those who never earn enough to file taxes going to need the most assistance when older? It’s not like they’ve had an opportunity to save anything for later, lacking income and all.
Seems kinda backward to exclude the poorest people, to me. (I never knew how interesting other country’s retirement systems and plans could be. I’ve always just kinda assumed they were all some variation on what my country has! How foolish of me! There must be dozens of ways to address these issues after all.)
We’ve hardly scratched the surface of the complexities of the Social Security system in this discussion.
If the SAHM was married, she could qualify for Social Security spousal benefits.
If she never married and never worked, she could continue to support herself however she was doing it for the previous 65 years of her life or she could try to collect from other benefit programs, just like any other poor person.
The title of this thread should be: “How Can I get Something for Nothing from the Gubmit”
You can get an estimate of your Social Security benefits here: https://www.ssa.gov/planners/benefitcalculators.html
I don’t know about you but my employer(s) and I have been paying into Social Security for over 30 years and still going.
Perhaps you have a different definition of “something for nothing” than I do though.
To be fair, the OP is specifically talking about people who have NOT paid into Social Security, which isn’t you. I hypothetical person who was legally required to pay into SS and fraudulently refused to do so and then tried to collect retirement benefits could indeed be described as trying to get something for nothing.
Stay at home Mom’s what? What possession of a stay at home Mom are you referring to?
Good point and well taken.
Not sure what the OP is after then.
What social safety nets exist for the indigent?
Can and do crooks claim SS?
I don’t know all the details, but as long as the working spouse is alive, the non-working spouse gets half the SS of the working spouse. So if the working spouse is earning $1200/month in SS, the spouse who didn’t earn income makes $600/month for $1800/month total for both of them.
I have no idea how those figures change if the non-working spouse gets a divorce or if the working spouse dies.
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A divorced, unmarried spouse can still claim the regular spousal benefit of 50% (but only from one prior spouse). At death, the surviving divorced spouse gets your full benefit. I believe the marriage must have lasted for ten years.
Medicare eligibility is the same for a non-working spouse.
(If there is more than one divorced spouse, each can qualify for a regular spousal benefit)