The window for correcting a Social Security earnings record doesn’t stay open forever. For workers approaching their late fifties, each year of delayed planning compounds the shortfall — and for the roughly Social Security Administration’s data on divorced workers, late-start earners represent one of the most financially vulnerable groups heading into retirement. It was that urgency that led me to San Jose in early March 2026, where I sat down with Linda Chen-Ramirez, a 58-year-old senior accountant who, by nearly every external measure, looks like someone who has it figured out.
She doesn’t entirely agree with that assessment.
A Reset Nobody Plans For
When I first spoke with Linda Chen-Ramirez, she pulled out a spiral notebook filled with projected numbers — retirement dates, benefit estimates, tuition payment schedules. The habit is professional instinct: she’s spent nearly two decades reconciling corporate accounts. But the numbers in this notebook are personal, and she said the margins are thinner than she’d like anyone to know.
Linda divorced at 49 after a 17-year marriage. The settlement required her to liquidate roughly $214,000 in shared retirement assets — money that had taken the better part of two decades to accumulate. “I walked away starting over at the age most people are thinking about when they want to retire,” she told me. “I wasn’t panicking, but I was very, very clear that I had no margin for error.”
In the nine years since the divorce, Linda has rebuilt aggressively. She earns approximately $138,000 annually and contributes the IRS maximum to her 401(k) — $23,500 in 2026 for workers under 60, plus the $7,500 catch-up contribution available to those 50 and older. Her current retirement balance sits around $310,000, which she acknowledges is roughly half what it would have been had she never divided assets in 2017.
The Social Security piece, though, is where the math gets harder to reconcile.
What the SSA Statement Actually Showed Her
Linda reviewed her Social Security statement online through the SSA’s My Social Security portal last fall. What she found was sobering but not surprising: the years from 2003 through 2012, when she worked part-time to raise her daughter and support her then-husband’s career relocation, show dramatically lower earnings credits than the years before and after.
Social Security calculates retirement benefits using a worker’s 35 highest-earning years. For Linda, those low-earning years from her marriage still drag down her average indexed monthly earnings — the formula the SSA uses to compute the base benefit. Even with strong earnings over the past nine years, she cannot erase those zeroed-out and near-zero years entirely. “The SSA doesn’t care why your earnings were low,” she said, with the flat candor of someone who’s already processed the grief of it. “They just average them in.”
One avenue Linda is still weighing: divorced spouse benefits. Under current SSA rules, a divorced spouse may be eligible to claim up to 50% of their ex-spouse’s full retirement benefit — provided the marriage lasted at least 10 years, the claimant is unmarried, and both parties are at least 62. Linda’s marriage lasted 17 years, which meets the threshold. She estimates her ex-husband’s benefit would be higher than hers, which means this option could meaningfully change her retirement income picture. She has not yet applied or made a decision.
The Costs the SSA Statement Doesn’t Cover
What makes Linda’s situation genuinely difficult isn’t any single expense — it’s the simultaneity of them. While she’s trying to rebuild a retirement cushion, she’s also paying $1,800 per semester toward her daughter Maya’s junior year at UC Davis, and contributing approximately $2,400 per month toward her 78-year-old mother’s assisted living facility in Fremont.
That second number is where the Medicare conversation becomes painful. Linda’s mother, Bea, has moderate memory impairment and requires 24-hour supervised care. Medicare does not cover custodial care — the category that includes assisted living and long-term personal care. According to the Medicare.gov coverage guidelines, the program covers skilled nursing facility care only under specific short-term conditions after a qualifying hospital stay. Bea does not meet those conditions on an ongoing basis.
Bea’s current facility costs roughly $5,800 per month. Medicare covers none of it. Bea’s own savings and Linda’s contributions currently fund it. Medicaid — the joint federal-state program that does cover long-term custodial care for qualifying individuals — requires an asset spend-down before a beneficiary typically qualifies. Linda is actively navigating that process with a Medicaid planning specialist, a process she described as “slower and more complicated than anything I’ve dealt with professionally.”
Nine Years to Close the Gap
When I asked Linda what a realistic retirement looks like for her, she was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone who hasn’t thought about it — the silence of someone who has thought about it too much.
Her Full Retirement Age, based on her birth year of 1967, is 67. She could claim Social Security as early as 62, but doing so would permanently reduce her monthly benefit by up to 30% compared to her FRA amount. Delaying to 70 would increase it by 24% beyond her FRA benefit, thanks to delayed retirement credits that accrue at 8% per year between FRA and age 70.
These are Linda’s estimates from her SSA statement, not guarantees — benefit amounts are subject to annual COLA adjustments and legislative changes. The 2025 COLA was 2.5%, the smallest increase since 2021. Whether future adjustments keep pace with actual healthcare and housing costs for retirees is a question Linda tracks with the vigilance of someone whose finances allow very little cushion for error.
“The tuition payments end next year when Maya graduates,” Linda told me. “That frees up almost $900 a month. And I know that’s supposed to feel like relief, but I look at it and I immediately think — that’s going straight toward the retirement gap.” She paused. “There’s no version of this where I get to exhale yet.”
What She Wishes She’d Known Sooner
Toward the end of our conversation, Linda circled back to a regret she’d mentioned briefly at the start: that she hadn’t reviewed her SSA earnings statement until two years ago. For nearly a decade after the divorce, she assumed her record was intact and growing. She didn’t realize that the low-earning years from her marriage were still embedded in her 35-year average — and that every year she continued working at her current salary was only partially offsetting them.
She’s not alone in that oversight. The SSA mails paper statements to workers aged 60 and older who aren’t yet receiving benefits and don’t have an online account. Younger workers can access their records anytime through the My Social Security portal. But many people — particularly those going through a financial disruption like divorce — aren’t in a position to focus on a benefits statement that won’t pay out for another 15 years.
What Linda is doing now is pragmatic: she’s working through the divorced spouse benefit question with the SSA directly, she’s tracking her mother’s Medicaid eligibility timeline month by month, and she’s holding off on any Social Security claiming decision until she has a clearer picture of her expenses post-Maya’s graduation and post-Medicaid transition. The analytical habits that serve her professionally are the same ones keeping her from making a premature call on a benefit that, for her, could mean a $540 per month difference depending on when she claims.
When I left Linda’s office, she was already back at her notebook. The numbers were the same ones they’d been that morning. The margin for error hadn’t changed. But she was still running the calculations — which, in her situation, might be the most important thing she can do right now.
Sloane Avery Wren is a Senior Benefits Writer at Benefit Beat covering Social Security, Medicare, and government benefits policy. This article is reported narrative journalism and does not constitute financial, legal, or benefits advice. Readers with specific questions about their Social Security record or Medicare eligibility should contact the Social Security Administration at 1-800-772-1213 or visit ssa.gov.
Leave a Reply