Check Your Social Security Earnings Record to Avoid a Wrong Benefit

Dr Ed Weir (0:00)

There's over 70 million people in the United States receiving Social Security benefits.

And I've done this for a few decades, ran the third business Social Security office in the country, been doing these YouTube videos for a few years here, number one channel and social media for all things, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. And my regular viewers will tell you that there's a lot of people out there not receiving the money they're eligible for. I would say millions of people are not receiving the money they're eligible for. That's why I do this live Q&A every single day. If you're watching this in a recording, I do this every day, three o'clock West Coast time, six o'clock East Coast time. So you, your family or friends are not able to join us right now, make sure you subscribe. And that way, if you ever have a question, you receive a weird letter from Social Security, come on over here and I can translate it into English for you. I was the one that sent out those letters for a few decades. So I know what they're supposed to say and what they say and what you can get around and maybe not so much get around. All right, so what type of benefits are people not getting? Number one is the check they're receiving. So the check they're receiving is sometimes wrong, or they're receiving the wrong check, as in the wrong program. They should have received disability rather than the retirement. They should have received independently entitled divorce spouse benefits instead of retirement. They should have started survivor benefits instead of disability benefits. Whatever the case may be, they should have not signed up for Medicare. So there's affordability issue is a big issue out there, but affordability is there's two parts of that. There's how much stuff costs bread and gas and bacon and eggs and all that kind of good stuff. But there's also how much money you have coming in. And so let's focus on how much money you have coming in. All right. So number one thing, there's, I could spend 12 hours on this video talking about all the different variables that people have in terms of, okay, yeah, here's why your check is wrong or here's why your check is right. So you're good. So let's go help out some other people. I don't have that time. We're going to be here for an hour. So if you have a particular situation, make sure you type it in the chat, record it. I go on to 24help.org, click on the little blue button and you can record a video and ask me and I'll play it. I've got a couple of videos today that people record it and I'll play those. Okay, so if in your particular check, so we're not talking about a check you should be receiving, but the check you are currently receiving, is it correct?

One of the big things is people don't check their earnings record. And now with the Social Security Administration really pushing everybody to go online and not getting help, they're not checking the stuff that they should be checking. The number one thing they should check is their earnings record. You go to my website, 24help.org, I've got a bunch of guides there, calculators. They're all free. You can download spouse benefits, retirement benefits, disability benefits, working and receiving retirement benefits. So go to again 24help.org and you'll see a bunch of guides there. Okay. So the earnings record.

When I used to take retirement claims, I've taken hundreds and hundreds of thousands of retirement claims, and I worked at Social Security. When people used to come into the office, they would come in the office before they come in the office, we used to prepare for the interview, we would type off their DQI or print off their DQI and their MBR and their NUMI and all this kind of stuff. It basically is a record of that particular person. Then particularly with the DQI, what is the DQI? That's your earnings record. We would say, hey, we've got some gaps here and we pass the piece of paper over on the table and say, hey, you see this gap right here? It says in 1987, it's got zero there, or you were making 60,000, 60,000, all of a sudden you made 30,000. Is that correct? And you say, oh no, that's not correct. I said, okay, let's go ahead and get it fixed. Let's find out where those earnings went, put it on your record, get you the right check. Or you say, oh yeah, no, I took a vacation that year, I got sick or whatever the case may be.