Roughly 40 percent of Americans who claim Social Security retirement benefits do so before reaching their full retirement age, according to Social Security Administration research — and most of them can never take it back. For many, that decision is not a choice. It is a financial emergency wearing a deadline.
I first heard about Sonia Yarbrough from a branch manager at a South Side Chicago credit union last October. The manager pulled me aside after a community financial literacy event and said, quietly, that a member had come in the week before asking about hardship withdrawal options on a small IRA — not because she wanted to, but because she felt she had no other move. The manager thought her story deserved to be told. After a few phone calls, Sonia agreed to sit down with me at a diner near her apartment in Bridgeport on a gray Tuesday morning in late November 2025.
She arrived exactly on time, ordered black coffee, and folded her hands on the table like someone who had already decided how much she was willing to share. Sonia Yarbrough is 65 years old, a marketing manager at a small tech startup, and one of the most self-contained people I have interviewed in a decade of covering government benefits. She does not want sympathy. She wants things to make sense.
The Injury That Started Everything
The sequence of events that brought Sonia to that credit union — and eventually to me — began in March 2024, when she slipped on an unmarked wet floor in her office building’s lobby and tore a meniscus in her left knee. The injury required surgery. She missed eleven weeks of work. She filed a workers compensation claim expecting it to be routine.
It was denied in June 2024. The employer’s insurer argued the injury occurred in a common-use area not under the company’s direct control, a classification dispute that Sonia said her HR department fumbled from the start. An appeal was filed, then stalled. Meanwhile, her out-of-pocket medical bills climbed past $14,200.
Sonia had also been quietly covering her younger brother Marcus’s community college tuition — roughly $4,800 per year — while managing her own rent and living expenses on a marketing manager’s salary she described as “enough if nothing goes wrong.” Things had gone wrong.
“I’m not the type to ask for help,” she told me, wrapping both hands around her coffee mug. “I’ve always figured it out myself. But after the workers comp thing fell apart, I started doing math I didn’t want to do.”
When Identity Theft Hit Her Social Security Record
In the fall of 2024, Sonia logged into her my Social Security account for the first time in several years to check her projected retirement benefit. What she found stopped her cold. Three years of earnings — 2018, 2019, and part of 2020 — showed as zero or near-zero on her official earnings record, despite the fact that she had been working full-time and paying payroll taxes throughout that period.
After several weeks of calls and a trip to her local Social Security field office, she pieced together what had happened. Someone had been fraudulently using a variant of her Social Security number to report income under a different employer in another state — a scheme investigators later described to her as “income skimming,” used to obscure the fraud. The scrambled records had partially erased her legitimate earnings history.
The SSA’s process for correcting earnings records requires documentation: W-2s, tax transcripts, pay stubs. Sonia had saved almost none of those records from 2018 and 2019. She spent months requesting transcripts from the IRS and tracking down a former employer who had since dissolved the business. “The SSA people were actually helpful,” she told me. “But the process is slow. Everything is slow. And meanwhile I’m watching my projected benefit number sitting there, wrong, like a lie about my whole working life.”
The Pressure to File Early — and What It Actually Costs
By early 2025, with her workers comp appeal still unresolved, medical debt accumulating, and her earnings record dispute open at the SSA, Sonia began seriously weighing whether to claim Social Security retirement benefits at 65 — two years before her full retirement age of 67.
The math is unforgiving. According to the SSA’s own benefit reduction tables, filing at 65 instead of 67 results in a permanent reduction of approximately 13.3 percent of your monthly benefit. For Sonia, whose corrected projected benefit was estimated at around $1,640 per month at full retirement age, that reduction would bring her monthly check down to roughly $1,423 — a difference of about $217 every single month, for life.
Sonia understood the numbers. She is sharp, and she had done her own calculations on a spreadsheet she showed me on her phone. “I know I’m leaving money on the table,” she said. “I ran the math six different ways. But I also have to eat and keep my brother in school right now. The math is different when you’re running out of time.”
What the Turning Point Actually Looked Like
The correction to Sonia’s earnings record was finalized in August 2025, fourteen months after she first discovered the problem. The SSA credited back two of the three disputed years after IRS transcripts confirmed her payroll tax payments. The third year — 2019 — remained partially unresolved due to incomplete employer records from the dissolved business. Her corrected projected benefit at 67 rose from an early estimate of roughly $1,490 to approximately $1,640 per month.
She filed for benefits in September 2025, two months after the correction came through, at age 65 and two months. Her first check arrived in November 2025: $1,431.
She still works full-time at the startup. Under SSA earnings limits, beneficiaries who claim before full retirement age and continue working can have their benefits temporarily withheld if earnings exceed a threshold — in 2025, that threshold was $22,320 per year. Sonia’s startup salary puts her close to that line, which means some months her benefit has been partially withheld. She describes navigating that calculation as “its own part-time job.”
“I wish someone had explained the earnings limit piece to me before I filed,” she said, not with anger, but with the flat tone of someone cataloguing what they would do differently. “I found out about it after. I thought once you filed, you just got the check.”
The Regret She Will Not Quite Name
When I asked Sonia whether she felt she had made the right call, she was quiet for a moment in a way that felt different from her earlier directness.
Her workers comp appeal remains technically open, though she has not pursued it actively since filing for Social Security. Her brother Marcus has one semester left before finishing his associate’s degree. She has started a small emergency fund — “$900 so far, which is nothing, but it’s something” — and she plans to keep working at the startup as long as her knee holds.
What stays with me from that diner conversation is not the numbers, which are harsh in the way that most Social Security early-filing numbers are harsh. It is the thing Sonia said when I asked what she would tell someone her age who was just starting to think about this.
She is right that it does not take care of itself. The SSA estimates that earnings discrepancies affect a meaningful share of workers’ records over time, and identity-related errors have grown more common in the past decade. Sonia’s situation — a perfect collision of injury, fraud, financial pressure, and institutional delay — is not typical. But no piece of it is unusual either. Any one of those problems shows up in my inbox every week. She just got all of them at once.
She left a tip that was larger than she probably should have left, paid the check before I could, and walked out into the November gray. She had a meeting at eleven.
Related: She Got a Raise, Then Got Hurt at Work — Her Workers’ Comp Was Denied and She’s Still Paying for It
Related: Her Social Security Went Up in January — But After Medicare Took Its Cut, Wanda Chen-Ramirez Was Back at Zero
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