The Social Security Administration encourages workers to review their estimated benefits at least once a year, particularly as they approach their sixties. Most people never do. Yolanda Nakamura, a 60-year-old licensed plumber from Fresno, California, was among that majority — until a quiet Tuesday morning in early March 2026 changed that.
I had stopped at a Savemart off Blackstone Avenue to pick up coffee when I noticed a woman in paint-stained work pants standing near the entrance, squinting at her phone with the kind of concentrated frustration that only comes from reading something financial. I introduced myself, mentioned what I cover for Benefit Beat, and handed her my card. She laughed and said, “You showed up at exactly the right moment.” Within the week, we sat down at her kitchen table in northwest Fresno and she walked me through everything.
A Number She Had Assumed for Years
Yolanda Nakamura has been a licensed plumber for 31 years. She runs her own small operation — two trucks, one part-time helper — and has built a solid reputation in the Fresno area for residential and light commercial work. Her husband, Marcus, has been a stay-at-home parent since their youngest was born in 2014. With three children and a single income, the household has always operated on tight margins.
For most of those 31 years, Yolanda had a rough mental estimate of what she expected from Social Security: somewhere around $2,200 a month at retirement, based on a paper statement she had received from the SSA years earlier during a busy earning stretch. She had never updated that figure in her head. “I just filed that away and told myself we’d be okay,” she told me. “I didn’t want to look too close. Looking too close at numbers makes me nervous.”
That changed when her accountant mentioned, almost offhandedly, that the Social Security Administration had updated its online portal and that she should check her estimate before making any decisions about winding down her business hours. Yolanda created a my Social Security account on her phone while waiting for a job estimate to print. The number she saw was $1,840 per month — not $2,200. The gap was $360 a month, roughly $4,320 a year, and it hit her hard.
Why Irregular Income Reshapes the Calculation
Yolanda’s situation is not unusual among self-employed tradespeople, but the mechanics behind it surprised her. The SSA calculates your benefit using your 35 highest-earning years. If you have fewer than 35 years of covered earnings, zeros are averaged in for the missing years. If you have 35 years but some were very lean — as often happens with self-employment — those low years drag down the average indexed monthly earnings, or AIME, which is the foundation of the benefit formula.
Yolanda’s earnings history was uneven in ways she hadn’t fully tracked. Her best years, between 2015 and 2022, saw net self-employment income ranging from $58,000 to $71,000. But her early years — the late 1990s and early 2000s — were much thinner, with some years under $24,000 as she built her client base. The years when her children were young also saw dips; childcare costs in Fresno for two kids ran her household close to $1,800 a month for several years, forcing her to take fewer jobs. Those quieter years are now baked permanently into her 35-year average.
“I knew my income bounced around,” Yolanda said when I laid out the mechanics. “I just never connected the dots that every skinny year was going to follow me into retirement. It feels like you’re being punished for the hard years twice — once when you’re living them and once when you collect.”
The Self-Employment Tax Piece She Had Forgotten
There was a second complication embedded in Yolanda’s situation. As a self-employed worker, she pays the full 15.3 percent self-employment tax on net earnings — both the employee and employer shares of Social Security and Medicare contributions. The SSA does credit half of that self-employment tax as a deduction against her income, but the taxable earnings reported to Social Security are based on net profit after business expenses, not gross receipts.
In years when Yolanda purchased new equipment or a truck — which happened in 2018 and again in 2021 — her reported net profit dropped significantly even though her actual workload was heavy. Those years look lean on her Social Security earnings record even though they didn’t feel lean at the time. “The truck years,” she called them, with a short laugh that didn’t reach her eyes.
According to the SSA’s guide for self-employed workers, net earnings from self-employment are multiplied by 92.35 percent before calculating the self-employment tax and determining Social Security coverage. That nuance is easy to miss when you’re focused on quarterly estimated taxes and keeping a small business running.
The Claiming Age Decision — and Why It Now Weighs on Her
Yolanda’s full retirement age is 67, since she was born in 1966. Under current Social Security rules, claiming at 62 — the earliest eligible age — would reduce her benefit by approximately 30 percent. That would bring her estimated $1,840 monthly benefit down to roughly $1,288. Waiting until 70 would add roughly 8 percent per year past her FRA, pushing her estimated benefit to approximately $2,285 a month.
The gap between claiming at 62 versus 70 works out to nearly $1,000 a month — or about $12,000 a year. Over a 20-year retirement, that difference compounds into a substantial sum. But Yolanda’s household depends entirely on her income today. Marcus has not worked outside the home in 12 years. Their youngest child is 11. The idea of working at full pace until 70 feels abstract and physically daunting for someone whose job requires crawling under houses and running pipe in Fresno’s summer heat.
The tension Yolanda described is one that benefits researchers have studied extensively. According to the SSA’s Office of Retirement and Disability Policy, workers in physically demanding occupations claim Social Security earlier on average than workers in sedentary roles — often because their bodies simply don’t allow them to delay. The financial tradeoff is real, and it disproportionately affects blue-collar workers who spent decades doing the physical labor that makes later claiming harder to sustain.
What She Did Next — and What She Wishes She Had Done Earlier
After our conversation, Yolanda made an appointment with her local SSA field office in Fresno. She wanted to request a full earnings record printout and verify that every year of income had been correctly recorded — a step the SSA recommends periodically, since errors in earnings records do occur and can only be corrected with documentation. She also asked her accountant to model what her benefit estimate would look like if she maximized her reported earnings for the next five to seven years by pulling back on certain business deductions.
“My accountant looked at me like I was crazy,” she told me during a follow-up phone call in late March. “She said, ‘You want to pay more in taxes now so you get more back in thirty years?’ And I said yes. Because now that I see the numbers, I actually understand what I’m trading.”
That spousal benefit piece was the one piece of information that shifted Yolanda’s mood most noticeably during our conversations. She had never considered it. Marcus’s years out of the workforce had felt like pure sacrifice with no Social Security return. Learning that his eligibility was tied to hers — and that the household total could exceed $2,700 a month at FRA even without him having his own substantial earnings record — gave her what she described as “the first real exhale I’ve had about retirement in years.”
The Anxiety That Lingers — and What Her Story Reflects
When I think about Yolanda’s story, what stays with me is not the specific dollar amounts but the years she spent deliberately not looking. She is an intelligent, capable person who built a business with her hands and raised three children on a single irregular income. And for nearly a decade, the anxiety of what she might find kept her from checking a number that took three minutes to look up.
That avoidance is not unusual. Researchers studying financial anxiety consistently find that middle-income households — particularly those with variable income and dependent family members — are among the least likely to engage with retirement planning tools, not because they don’t care but because the emotional cost of confronting uncertainty feels higher than the discomfort of not knowing. Yolanda’s situation was not a crisis. But it was a $360-a-month gap that had been sitting quietly in a portal she never opened.
She still hasn’t decided when she will claim. That decision, she told me, feels like something she needs another year or two to sit with. Her youngest finishes middle school in 2027. Marcus has started talking about going back to work part-time once the kids are older. The variables are still moving. What has changed is that Yolanda is no longer making that decision in the dark.
“I’m not going to pretend I have it all figured out,” she told me the last time we spoke. “But at least now I know what the actual number is. That’s something. That’s more than I had before.”
Related: Claiming Social Security at 62 Cost Me $312 a Month — The Permanent Penalty Nobody Warned Me About
Related: Glenn Fitzgerald Gets $1,847 a Month From Social Security. His Twin 3-Year-Olds Cost Nearly Double That
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