Most people check their Social Security earnings record exactly once in their lives — the week before they retire. By then, correcting errors or filling gaps in the record is nearly impossible. That assumption costs some workers thousands of dollars a year in benefits they’ve already earned but can’t fully claim.
I met Sheila Underwood on a gray Tuesday in March 2026, not through a retirement seminar or a government outreach program, but through a credit union manager in Albuquerque who called me after Sheila had come in asking about hardship loan options. The manager, who asked not to be named, told me Sheila’s situation was unlike anything she’d seen that month. “She didn’t come in panicking,” the manager said. “She came in organized, with a spreadsheet. But the numbers were devastating.”
When I sat down with Sheila Underwood at a coffee shop near her job site on Menaul Boulevard, she was still in her work clothes — steel-toed boots, union logo on her jacket. She’s 50 years old, a licensed journeyman electrician with IBEW Local 611, and she has spent the better part of three decades wiring buildings across New Mexico. She is not someone who asks for help easily.
The Debt That Arrived After the Divorce
Sheila’s divorce from her husband of eleven years was finalized in October 2025. She told me she had assumed it was a clean break — no children, a modest property settlement, and a relatively straightforward split. She was wrong.
“The first statement showed up in January,” she told me, sliding a folded piece of paper across the table. “A credit card I didn’t even know existed. Fourteen thousand dollars. Then another one. Then another one.” By the time Sheila had tracked every account her ex-husband had opened — some jointly, some in her name without her knowledge — the total came to $52,400 in outstanding debt.
Her income as a union electrician is strong on paper — she earns approximately $38 an hour when working, which can top $85,000 in a full year. But union construction work runs in cycles. In 2023, a slowdown in commercial projects in Bernalillo County meant she logged only about 1,100 billable hours instead of the typical 1,900. Her gross income that year dropped to roughly $41,800.
She had also been running a small side business doing residential electrical repairs since 2019. At its peak in 2021, that business brought in around $22,000 a year. By early 2026, she told me, it had dropped to closer to $7,500 — partly because she’d had less time to market it during the divorce, and partly because a larger contractor had moved into her neighborhood and undercut her rates.
What the Social Security Statement Actually Said
The debt was the immediate crisis. But the credit union manager had suggested something else to Sheila during their meeting: pull your Social Security earnings record before you do anything else. Sheila had never done this. Not once in 28 years of paying into the system.
“I honestly thought it just… tracked itself,” she said, with a short laugh that carried more exhaustion than humor. “I figured whatever they had was right. I never thought to look.”
When Sheila finally created a my Social Security account at SSA.gov and pulled her full earnings record, she found two problems. First, the years 2019 through 2022 showed lower reported income than she expected — her side business revenue had not been consistently reported on Schedule SE, meaning her self-employment taxes were understated and the earnings weren’t fully credited to her Social Security record. Second, 2023’s low earnings year was there in black and white, a noticeably thin line in an otherwise solid record.
The statement projected her monthly benefit at full retirement age — 67, for someone born in 1975 — at approximately $2,340. That number assumes she continues working at current earning levels. Given her current debt load and the declining side business, she’s not sure that assumption holds.
The Detail About Her Marriage That Changed the Calculation
Here is where Sheila’s story took a turn that neither of us expected when we started talking. When she described her marriage as lasting eleven years, I asked whether she had looked into divorced spouse benefits under Social Security. She had not heard of them.
Under Social Security rules, a divorced person may be eligible to collect benefits based on an ex-spouse’s work record if the marriage lasted at least ten years, the claimant is currently unmarried, and both parties are at least 62. The benefit is up to 50 percent of the ex-spouse’s full retirement amount — and, critically, collecting it does not reduce the ex-spouse’s own benefit at all. According to the Social Security Administration, you can claim divorced spouse benefits even if your ex has not yet filed for their own retirement.
Sheila’s ex-husband worked primarily in retail management. His earnings record, which she cannot access directly but can estimate based on their shared tax returns during the marriage, suggests his full retirement benefit would be meaningfully lower than hers. Her own union wages, accumulated over nearly three decades, appear to produce a stronger individual benefit. Still, knowing the option exists gave her something she hadn’t felt in months.
“I didn’t know that was even a thing,” she told me. “Nobody tells you this stuff when you’re signing divorce papers. Your lawyer is focused on the house and the accounts. Nobody sits you down and talks about what happens to Social Security.”
The Harder Math: Irregular Income and What It Costs Long-Term
The irregular income problem is more complicated than it first appears. Social Security calculates your benefit using your 35 highest-earning years, adjusted for inflation. If you have fewer than 35 years of earnings, the SSA fills in zeros for the missing years — dragging down the average significantly.
Sheila has been working since she was 22 and started her apprenticeship. That gives her 28 years of earnings records — still seven short of the 35-year threshold. Her projected benefit already incorporates seven future earning years. If she scales back due to the debt burden, those projected years become weaker, and her benefit estimate shrinks accordingly.
“The side business was always just extra,” she said. “But now I’m realizing I wasn’t reporting it right, and that has a cost I didn’t see coming. I was so busy just doing the work that I never thought about whether the paperwork was actually protecting me.”
Where Sheila Stands Now — and What She’s Still Figuring Out
When I spoke with Sheila in late March 2026, she had been through a meeting with a credit counselor, had disputed two of the fraudulent accounts with the major credit bureaus, and had reduced her monthly expenses by approximately $640 by cutting the side business’s operating costs to near zero. She had also filed amended returns for 2019 and 2020 to correct the self-employment income underreporting — a step her accountant confirmed could still be taken for those years.
She has not decided when to retire. The $2,340 monthly estimate at 67 feels distant and uncertain. She told me she has thought about working until 70 — which, under current SSA rules, would increase her benefit by roughly 8 percent per year beyond full retirement age, potentially pushing her monthly check above $2,900.
But she was also honest about the limits of planning from where she sits. “Right now, I’m just trying to get through the next six months without the debt eating everything I’ve saved,” she told me. “The retirement stuff — I know it matters. I just have to get stable first.”
That instinct — to defer the long-term thinking until the immediate crisis is resolved — is understandable. It is also exactly the pattern that leaves workers like Sheila with less than they’ve earned. She has paid into Social Security for nearly three decades. She has built a union record that most workers her age would envy. And she nearly let all of it go unexamined because no one in her life had ever told her to look.
Sheila walked out of the coffee shop without any more certainty than she’d walked in with. The debt is still there. The side business is still struggling. But she left with a printed copy of her Social Security earnings record in her jacket pocket — something she hadn’t owned, in all those years of work, until now.
Related: Claiming Social Security at 62 Cost Me $312 a Month — The Permanent Penalty Nobody Warned Me About
Related: He’s 54, Over-Leveraged on a Mortgage, and Counting on a Social Security Check That Won’t Arrive for 8 Years
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