Are you aware that a single $1,000 deposit that the government’s gonna put into your child or your grandchild’s Trump account could actually grow into more than $490,000 by the time they reach retirement age, all without you ever having to put in another dollar? If you stay with us, you’re gonna learn how that is possible.

I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for tuning in. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. We are your retirement income source, and this is the place where retirees come for income. We’ve got a fantastic lineup for you because we’re gonna spend some time talking about Trump accounts. I know that a lot of you have heard about them and probably don’t realize how valuable they could be.

We’re also gonna spend some time talking about 529 college plans. We’re gonna also talk about Roth conversions, and we’re gonna talk about two benefits with regards to Social Security that a lot of you might be missing, and these are the divorced spousal benefit and the divorced survivors benefit.

We’re gonna break those down for you in this show as well. And of course, we’re gonna answer your listener questions along the way. If you have a question for the show, all you need to do is work your way over to providencefinancialradio.com and you can ask your question there. Maybe we’ll get a chance to have a discussion about it and answer it in a future episode.

Let’s start, though, by taking some time to break down Trump accounts. What are they? Well, the answer is, they are IRA accounts that anyone can set up for a minor child, anyone under the age of 18 years old. The rules are that anyone can contribute up to $5,000 per month into a minor’s Trump account without any restriction.

Normally, with IRAs, you have to have wage income, but a minor is not gonna have wage income, so that rule is waived for a Trump account. Because it’s an IRA, though, it’s gonna be treated as an IRA for that child. When you make a contribution, you’re going to pay tax on that income. So unlike a traditional IRA, when you make a contribution, you’re gonna wind up paying tax on that contribution, and it’s not tax-deductible as it would be as if you were to add that money to your own IRA.

But it is gonna grow tax-deferred, and when the child decides to make the withdrawals of those funds, they’re gonna wind up paying tax on those dollars. And the funds cannot just be left sitting idle, and they also can’t be invested in individual stocks or bonds. They have to be invested in a broad-based US index fund.

But you can contribute up to $5,000 per year per child, and it doesn’t matter who makes the contributions. You should also know that once you make a contribution to that child’s IRA, you cannot take it back. It’s an irrevocable contribution and it’s theirs. And once they turn 18 years old, they can do with it whatever they want.

If they’re smart, they’re gonna let it continue to grow for the reasons that we’ll touch on in just a minute. Donald Trump and the government have also decided that they want to throw some seed money into a child’s account if that child is qualifying. And in order to be a qualifying child, they have to be born between 2025 and 2028, and they have to be a US citizen.

That’s it. If they meet those criteria, then the government is gonna make a one-time deposit of $1,000 as seed money. And you might think about that and consider it to not be a big deal, but in reality, it’s a huge deal. Depending on how the investments perform, when that child turns 18 years old, that account, that $1,000 that the government put in one time, will probably be worth somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000.

And if that child is smart and they let that money sit there until they’re 65 years old, oh my gosh, that number is big, because that account will probably be worth somewhere around a half a million dollars. That’s huge. So don’t look at it as the government just giving you only $1,000. The government might be giving that child as much as a half a million dollars through their one-time deposit of $1,000.

And if you’re a parent or grandparent, you would be absolutely silly not to open a Trump account for any qualifying child. Again, a child born between 2025 and 2028 who’s a US citizen. There’s no restrictions, there’s no income limits. All you need to do is open the account, and I’ll tell you how to do that in just a few minutes.

That, however, takes us to our first listener question of the day And it comes from Jennifer in Moorpark, and she wrote in this: “My son was born in March 2025. Do we automatically get the $1,000 or do I need to sign up for something?” Well, the answer, Jennifer, is no, you don’t get it automatically. You do have to sign up for it, and you can do that by downloading the Trump Accounts app either from the Apple Store or Google Play, or just go to trumpaccounts.gov on any computer.

But the process is pretty straightforward. The government has also said that they’re gonna start making deposits into the Trump Account starting on July 4th. So if you haven’t opened an account yet, you haven’t missed anything. But if you do have a qualifying child or grandchild born between 2025 and 2028, you wanna make sure to open a Trump Account for them because that could be potentially a free half million dollars.

If you wanna learn more about Trump Accounts, you can always search it on the web, or if it’s easier, we’ve put together a short explainer, and we’ll email this report, this Trump Account explainer, right over to you as soon as you ask for it. And you can do that by going to providencefinancialradio.com/report.

Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/report. And once we get your information, you’ll receive an email shortly, and you’ll be able to read this report and get all the information you need about Trump Accounts. And I know that you’re gonna find it really valuable. Just go to providencefinancialradio.com/report, give us your information, and you’ll have that report in your inbox shortly.

I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us wherever you might be listening from. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show, and today we’re talking about Trump Accounts, which we just did. We’re gonna talk about 529 plans here in just a few minutes. These are college savings plans.

And then we’re gonna talk a little bit about Roth conversions and also a couple of benefits that people often miss when it comes to Social Security, namely the divorce spouse benefit and the divorce survivors benefit. Our goal at Providence Financial is to help you have confidence and clarity going into your retirement.

And I certainly hope you learned something you didn’t know before by listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. I wanna shift gears, though, and spend a few minutes talking about 529 college savings plans. It’s not something that we talk about a lot, and it’s not my favorite way to save for college, but I do wanna give you some information about how they work.

First off, though, what is a 529 college savings plan? When you open a 529 plan, you can make any amount of contribution that you want. There’s no limits to the amount that you can contribute. And you won’t get a tax deduction for contributions, but if those contributions are used for qualifying educational expenses, then all of the earnings are gonna come out tax-free.

So it’s gonna grow tax-deferred, and then the earnings will be tax-free if they’re used properly. And there’s really not a lot of restrictions. You can use it for tuition, you can use it for room and board, you can use it for school supplies, you can use it for housing. Really a lot of reasons that someone going to college can make these withdrawals and have the money be tax-free.

A college savings plan, then, is an account that’s designed to allow a beneficiary to go to college. You put money in, you pay tax on that money, but as long as it’s used for a qualifying expense, it comes out tax-free. One thing that’s probably worth noting, though, is simply the fact that the older the child gets, the less valuable the 529 plan is.

If you set up a 529 plan for a newborn, then it potentially has 18 or so years to actually grow tax-deferred, and the compounding in there could make that, uh, dollar amount grow significantly, and it’s all tax-free if it’s used for educational expenses. But if a child is 15 or 16 years old and they’re gonna go to college in a couple years, you only have a couple of years for that compounding to take effect.

Many times, I don’t recommend a 529 plan for older children just for that reason. One question that we often get, though, is, what if a beneficiary doesn’t go to college? Well, good news is that you can always change beneficiaries. So if one doesn’t go to college, you can always take those funds and shift it to a beneficiary who’s gonna go to college.

What if none of your beneficiaries go to college? Now you have this 529 college savings plan and no one to use it on. What are your options then? Well, there’s a couple. The first option is you can take these 529 plans and roll them into a Roth IRA in the beneficiary’s name. It’s not gonna be your money, it’s gonna be the beneficiary’s money, but it’s going to be completely tax-free to them.

And there are rules that you need to know, such as the 15-year rule, which means that the account has to be there for 15 years before you can actually do this. But if you do a rollover of a 529 plan into a Roth IRA, it’s completely tax and penalty-free. There are other ways you can get that out, though. You can always decide to take it back and withdraw the entire account, but if you do that, you’re gonna be subject to tax and 10% penalty on any of the earnings on that account. Not on the initial contributions, just the earnings.

And there are also some exceptions to that 10% penalty. If the beneficiary dies or becomes disabled, or if they receive a tax-free scholarship, or they attend a US military academy, or they even get some qualifying employer educational assistance, all of those will allow you, as the owner of the 529 plan, to make a full withdrawal of that 529, and they’ll waive the 10% penalty. You’ll still have to pay taxes on the growth, but at least there’s no penalty.

When you open a 529 plan, at least you’re the one in control. You’re not giving it to a beneficiary irrevocably like you are with the Trump account. If you wanna learn more about 529 plans and even what I think might be a good alternative, I wrote about that in my book, More Life Than Money.

I wanna send you More Life Than Money absolutely free of charge. You just have to request it, and you can do that by going to providencefinancialradio.com/book. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/book, and a brand-new hardcover copy of More Life Than Money will show up on your doorstep in just a few days.

To claim your free copy of More Life Than Money, go to providencefinancialradio.com/book and we’ll get it out shortly.

I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for staying with us. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show, where it truly is all about the income. Really glad that you’re joining us today, and I certainly hope that you get some information that you didn’t have before. Because that’s a goal of our show, is to help you have the peace of mind that you deserve in retirement.

A very popular topic if you’re retired or close to retirement is that of a Roth conversion. We have those conversations virtually every day, and a lot of times people poo-poo them and have come to their own conclusions. But more commonly, people have heard about them, but they’ve just never really looked into them seriously, and that could be a mistake.

I wanna focus, though, on one aspect of the Roth conversion in the next few minutes that we’re gonna spend together talking about it, and that is when’s the best time to do a Roth conversion? For those of you who may not know what a Roth conversion is, let me set the table. A Roth conversion is when you take money out of a traditional IRA and you transfer it to a Roth IRA.

That’s called a conversion. You’re gonna pay tax on the amount that you convert, but anything that you convert to a Roth IRA is gonna be tax-free forever. And in case you’re wondering, it’s not a bad idea to have some tax-free growth in your portfolio There is a common question that comes up frequently, and that is, when is the best time to do a conversion?

And that’s what I wanna spend some time talking about. The best time to do Roth conversion is generally in the bridge years. What’s that? Well, those are the years between the time you stop working and retire and the time you turn 73 or 75 years old, which is when you have to start taking required minimum distributions.

During those years, your income’s probably gonna be less because you’re retired. You don’t have any wage income anymore. That means your tax bracket’s probably gonna be lower. If that turns out to be true, then you’re gonna pay less tax on the conversion as opposed to when you were working. If you do conversions while you’re working and you have all that wage income to report, you’re gonna pay a much higher tax on the amount that you convert.

And that doesn’t instantly disqualify you from doing it, it’s just something to keep in mind. But generally, the best time to start doing Roth conversions is between the time you stop working and the time you’re going to turn required minimum distribution age. How much you should convert is also another topic of conversation and question that many of you have, and that’s certainly gonna depend on how much retirement income you have.

But I often refer to an approach that I call filling up the buckets. Let me explain. If you’re married and filing a joint return, you can make up to about $130,000 a year and never leave the 12% federal tax bracket. Many of you aren’t even making that much. You might be making $75,000 a year and paying 12% on that money, and yet you could be earning another 50 or $60,000 per year and still never leave that 12% tax bracket.

Well, that’s a prime opportunity to do Roth conversion. You fill up your current tax bucket with a conversion, you only pay 12% tax on that conversion, and now the amount that you converted is tax-free. And that’s what I mean when I say filling up the bucket. The general idea is that you do enough conversions so that your income, including the conversions, never leaves the current tax bracket that you’re in.

And by doing this, you never pay any more tax than you’re paying on your current income. The reason why most people don’t do Roth conversions is because, of course, they have to pay the tax. What you need to understand, though, is that you’re gonna have to pay the tax on that money at some point anyway.

Even if you don’t need the money, the government’s gonna force you to start making withdrawals through required minimum distributions. The question then becomes, when do you wanna pay the tax? You wanna pay the tax on your own terms when you can take that money and put it into a Roth IRA so it grows tax-free forever?

Or do you wanna follow the government’s plan and just pay tax on required minimum distributions when they force you to? It’s the difference between being proactive and being reactive, and if you’ve listened to the Providence Financial Retirement Show for any length of time at all, you know that I’m a big fan of being proactive, especially when it comes to tax planning.

Not considering Roth conversions, though, could be a mistake. And when it comes to your retirement, there’s a lot of potential mistakes that you could make, and you only get one shot at retirement, so if you make it, you might not be able to recover. If you wanna learn more about some of the most common mistakes that I’ve seen retirees make over my 27-year career being a retirement advisor, we’ve put together a video that talks about the seven most common retirement mistakes that I’ve seen retirees make and what you need to do to avoid them.

If you’d like to get that video just so you can be better educated and make sure you don’t make any of these mistakes, we’ll send it to you free of charge. But you do have to give us your information to get it, and that’s easy. All you need to do is go over to providencefinancialradio.com/video. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/video.

Once we have your information, we’ll email you this short animated video, and you’ll be able to learn about the seven most common mistakes. And because it’s animated, it’s fun to watch. And it’s only seven or eight minutes long, but it’s really power-packed. You’re gonna learn a lot. To get your free animated video about the seven most common mistakes that I’ve seen retirees make, go to providencefinancialradio.com/video and you’ll get it right away.

No cost, no obligation, just information. I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for staying with us. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show, where it truly is all about the income. We’ve already talked about Trump accounts, we talked about 529 plans, and now we’re in the middle of a good conversation about Roth conversions and when is the best time to do a conversion and what should be the strategy.

When it comes to doing a Roth conversion, though, there is something that you do need to be aware of, and that is with regards to the IRMAA tax. IRMAA stands for Income Related Monthly Adjustment Amount, and it’s IRMAA that’s going to determine how much premiums you’re gonna pay for Medicare Part B. The more income you make, the more premium you’re gonna wind up having to pay on a monthly basis.

And when you do a Roth conversion, that’s going to count as income. Doing a Roth conversion then without knowing how it’s gonna affect your IRMAA is a mistake that we often see people make, and they wind up having to pay higher premiums for their Medicare Part B, and this was something they didn’t even factor into the calculation.

So you need to know about it. If you’re a single filer and you make less than $109,000 per year of modified adjusted gross income, or you’re married filing jointly and you make less than $218,000 per year of modified adjusted gross income, then you’re going to pay the base premium, which is $202.90 per person, anyone that is taking Medicare Part B.

If you make more than that, then there’s a graduated scale that essentially says that wherever you fall in with regards to the income category, you’re gonna wind up having to pay additional premium on Part B. The highest premium that you’re gonna have to pay for Part B is $689.90 per person, but you have to make over $500,000 a year of modified adjusted gross income to get to that category, and there’s a lot of different levels in between.

It’s important to know that when you do a Roth conversion, though It’s going to trigger your IRMAA tax, and you have to factor that in. There is one thing, though, that is often, often missed when it comes to IRMAA, and that is some exceptions when it comes to having to pay that higher premium. IRMAA is calculated on your tax return of two years ago, so it’s 2026, which means that whether or not you have to pay IRMAA is going to depend on your 2024 tax return.

But there are times, though, that your tax return might have a bump in income that is temporary, maybe just a one-time event, and there are certain qualifying life-changing events that allow you to request an exception on your Medicare Part B premiums. The first qualifying event is retirement. Many people don’t know this.

They incorrectly believe that if they retire, they’re gonna pay high Medicare Part B premiums for the next couple of years because of that retirement income. But that’s an exception. Other exceptions include if you get married or divorced, or death of a spouse, or a loss of income-producing property, or loss of pension income, or even an employer settlement payment.

Those are exceptions that allow you to file for a reduced Medicare Part B premium. But it doesn’t happen automatically. In order to request an exception, you have to fill out form SSA-44. But there are exceptions that may allow you to not have to pay Medicare premium based on your income two years ago, and retiring is certainly one of those.

If you’d like to learn more about required minimum distributions or Roth conversions or IRMAA, well, in my book, More Life Than Money, I wrote all about those, and I know you’re gonna benefit by reading it. And we’ll send you a free copy. Absolutely free, no obligation. You just have to let us know you want it, and you can do that by going to providencefinancialradio.com/book.

Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/book. Give us your information, and a copy of More Life Than Money will show up on your doorstep in just a few days. But I know you’re gonna learn something by reading it. Go to providencefinancialradio.com/book and you’ll have it soon.

Thank you for joining us. My name is Anthony Saccaro. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show, where it truly is all about the income. We are your retirement income source, and this is the place where retirees come for income. We’re in the middle of a great show. We’ve already talked about Trump accounts.

We’ve talked about 529 college savings plans. We just talked about Roth conversions, and now we’re gonna spend some time talking about long-term care. This is a topic that a lot of you don’t really wanna talk about, and as a result, it gets procrastinated on, and many times, by the time you need long-term care, it’s just too late.

But the time to figure out what your plan is gonna be is not after it’s too late, but going back to the concept of being proactive, you wanna start thinking about that now while you can. Just for quick reference sake, let’s talk about what long-term care is. It’s custodial care. That means you’re not rehabilitating, you’re really not gonna get any better, and yet you can’t live life on your own.

It could be because you have a cognitive impairment like Alzheimer’s or dementia. It could be because you physically can’t get around. But it’s the type of care that’s gonna require some help, and in a worst-case scenario, it means having full-time healthcare at home or even having to be in a convalescent facility.

And I know none of you want that to happen, but no one who’s in a convalescent facility wanted that to happen. But the risk is still there, and ignoring it doesn’t make the risk go away. It just means you put it out of mind. If you look at the statistics as to who is potentially gonna need some type of long-term care, those numbers kind of vary all over the place, but generally speaking, someone who is over 65 years old has a 70% chance of needing some type of long-term care in their lifetime.

That’s a pretty high percentage odds. And if you’re married, that statistic can go up to 90% chance that one of you is gonna need some type of long-term care, and those odds are pretty high, and they don’t go away by ignoring it. You probably already have an idea as to how expensive it is, but if you’ve never dealt with the long-term care in your family or had any friends that have needed it, maybe you don’t know.

Having been a retirement advisor though for well over a quarter of a century, I’ve seen people spending somewhere between $150,000 per year and $300,000 per year per person for a full-time long-term care situation. That’s very expensive, and most portfolios can’t handle that. If you’re thinking that Medicare’s gonna pay for it, well, you wanna think again, ’cause Medicare doesn’t cover long-term care, and this is probably new information to some of you.

I wanna bring in our next listener question of the day though, and it comes from Karen in Camarillo, and she wrote in, “My mother is in a nursing home, and Medi-Cal is covering it after she spent down her savings. Is that really the only option? Because I wanna make sure that that doesn’t happen to me. How do I plan differently for myself?”

Well, Karen, that’s a fantastic question, and you’re living that long-term care situation with your mom, and I’m sorry for that because I know how tough it is. It’s not just the finances, but it’s the emotional turmoil of knowing that your mom is in a place where she certainly doesn’t want to be. Medi-Cal is a government program that is funded partly by the state of California and partly by the federal government.

In all other states, it’s referred to as Medicaid. Either way though, they’re both government programs, and in order to qualify for them, you really have to have no money left. These government programs should not be a part of your long-term care strategy. These government programs are usually What happens to people who didn’t do any planning?

And when you have to turn to a government program, there’s gonna be a lot of restrictions. You have to be in a convalescent facility of their choice because you can’t just go anywhere you want. They have to be Medicaid approved, or Medi-Cal approved here in California. And although there are some benefits if you stay at home, a lot of the expenses are still gonna be picked up by you.

They’re not gonna cover the full bill. So a lot of restrictions when it comes to using these government programs. But Karen, that doesn’t have to happen to you, and in a few minutes, we’re gonna talk about what a good alternative is to make sure that you’re protected down the road if that does happen to you, if you do have a long-term care event.

But certainly, Karen, I thank you for taking the time to write in that question. If you’re worried about long-term care like Karen is, and you wanna learn more about it and how to protect yourself, well, there are four distinct ways to fund a long-term care, and I designate an entire chapter in my book, More Life Than Money, to talking about long-term care and how to protect yourself.

I’d like to send you More Life Than Money free of charge, and all you have to do to get it is just request it. You can do that by going to providencefinancialradio.com/book. The website is providencefinancialradio.com/book, and in a few days you’ll have More Life Than Money show right up on your doorstep, and you’ll learn what you need to know to be able to protect yourself from a catastrophic long-term care event.

If you want a copy of More Life Than Money, just go to providencefinancialradio.com/book and you’ll have it shortly. If you just hopped on, you’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement show. Thank you for joining us wherever you might be. I’m really glad that you’re here and certainly hope you’re enjoying the show and learning something that you didn’t know before.

We’re in the middle of a discussion about long-term care, and I wanna talk about one of the most popular ways to cover yourself in case something like that ever happens to you, and that is with long-term care insurance. Now, this is not the traditional long-term care insurance that you probably are familiar with The type of insurance where it’s limited, you can only use it for a certain number of years, and the insurance companies can raise the premiums anytime they want, which by the way, they’ve done.

This is not that. Long-term care insurance has evolved into something that’s really much more beneficial, and most people that we’ve educated about the new types of long-term care insurance out there are really amazed as to how good it is. I wanna spend a few minutes then and talk about a way that you could actually pay for long-term care without breaking the bank.

What is this new type of insurance that long-term care insurance has actually evolved into? Well, Robert from Calabasas is gonna introduce this very nicely with a question that he wrote in, which is this: “One of my buddies mentioned something called asset-backed insurance for long-term care, and from what he describes, it sounds pretty good, but I’d love to actually understand the specifics before I look into it.”

And Robert, thank you for taking the time to write in your question, but you hit the nail on the head. Asset-backed insurance is long-term care insurance that is really becoming very, very popular over the last few years because it’s fairly new. If you’ve thought about long-term care, and you’ve poo-poohed it because it’s too expensive, and you’ve never even heard of asset-backed insurance, you’re gonna wanna pay attention Asset-backed insurance is a combination of life insurance and long-term care insurance in one policy.

It actually covers both risks. If you need long-term care insurance, it’s gonna cover you for that, and if you never need long-term care insurance, then it acts as a life insurance policy, and it’s gonna pay a death benefit. And like all life insurance policies, that death benefit is tax-free. The number one reason why many of you have never bought long-term care insurance is because you believe you’re never going to need it.

And with the old style traditional long-term care plans, if you never need it, then you’ve paid into it for years, maybe decades, and all that money is gone. But with an asset-backed insurance policy, because it doubles as a life insurance policy, if you never actually need long-term care, then there’s gonna be a death benefit that pays out to your beneficiaries, so at least that money you’ve been paying is not wasted.

There are lots of ways to set it up, and we don’t have time in this short show to really get into depth, but just understand that if you need long-term care, there are gonna be substantial benefits for you, and if you never need long-term care, then there’s a death benefit that’s gonna go to your beneficiaries.

So it’s gonna get used either way, and that’s a part of what makes them so attractive. And generally speaking, they’re a lot less than you might imagine, and the benefits are a lot more than you might imagine, and I really wish I had time to get into depth. If you wanna learn more about asset-backed long-term care, though, in my book, More Life Than Money, I wrote an entire chapter about that.

I give you some hard illustrations, I walk you through some numbers, and I walk you through some of how it could work, and I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from that chapter from people who have read it. Because you’re a KNX AM 1070 listener, I’ll send you More Life Than Money free of charge, so you can read that chapter about long-term care.

And while you’re at it, I also talk about 10 other common mistakes that I’ve seen retirees make and how to avoid them as well. And I know you’re gonna find something of interest, including that chapter about long-term care. To get your free copy of More Life Than Money, just go to providencefinancialradio.com/book.

The website again is providencefinancialradio.com/book, and we’ll send it right out. No cost, no obligation, just the information you need so that you can protect yourself from a long-term care event if that ever happens to you. To order your free copy, just go to providencefinancialradio.com/book and you’ll have it soon.

Thank you for joining us here for the Providence Financial Retirement Show. I’m Anthony Saccaro, your host, and we’re having a great show. We’ve talked about several different topics already. We started off the show by talking about Trump accounts, and then we moved into 529 plans. We talked about Roth conversions, and just most recently in the last segment, we talked about long-term care and the odds that you might need it, and asset-backed insurance, which is a new way to be able to protect yourself.

We’re gonna move on, though, and we’re gonna talk about two benefits that are often missed when it comes to Social Security, and that is the divorced spouse benefit and the divorced survivor benefit. As long as you were married for over ten years, then if you get divorced, you may still be entitled to some benefits based on your ex-spouse’s working record.

Before we go there, though, let’s talk about what the spousal benefit is before you get divorced. The spousal benefit allows a non-breadwinner spouse to be able to file for their own Social Security or fifty percent of the breadwinner spouse’s primary insurance amount if that amount is greater than their own.

And it’s pretty straightforward, but it’s often missed. But that’s a mouthful, so let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re the breadwinner spouse and that your Social Security is gonna be two thousand dollars per month. The non-breadwinner spouse, let’s say their Social Security is only five hundred dollars per month based on their own working record.

Well, because the breadwinner spouse’s Social Security was two thousand dollars, if you divide that in half, that comes out to a thousand dollars per month. And because that thousand dollars per month is bigger than the non-breadwinner spouse’s five hundred dollars per month, the non-breadwinner spouse will be able to collect the one thousand dollar per month every month.

And this is while both spouses are alive. You don’t wanna confuse this for the survivor benefit, which happens a lot, and we’re gonna talk about the survivor’s benefit in just a few minutes. What many of you don’t know, though, is that if you’re divorced, again, as long as you were married for more than ten years, then you can still claim the divorced spouse benefit.

In our example, the spousal benefit was one thousand dollars per month, and if you qualify by having been married more than ten years, then you can still get that spousal benefit even though you are divorced, and that benefit’s missed a lot. The caveat here is that you have to file for it because Social Security doesn’t follow your marriage.

They don’t know if you’re married or divorced or what the situation is, and this benefit is not automatic. You may have to file for it, and if you don’t, you could be missing this benefit completely. Here’s another interesting twist to this. If you’re divorced and you’re entitled to the divorced spouse benefit, but you get married before you turn 60 years old, that benefit is gone as long as you’re in the new marriage.

But if you get married after the age of 60 years old, you still now qualify for that divorced spouse benefit. And if that benefit is valuable enough to you and you’re thinking about getting married at 59 or 59 and a half, it may absolutely make sense to delay until after you’re 60 years old just for that benefit.

In a nutshell, though, that’s how the divorced spouse benefit works. If you’re divorced and I’ve just piqued your interest because you weren’t aware of this, but you wanna learn more, in my book, More Life Than Money, I designate an entire chapter to all the benefits that Social Security will offer you, including the divorced spouse benefit.

I’ll send you a copy of More Life Than Money free of charge. And to let us know that you want it, really easy, just go to our website, providencefinancialradio.com/book. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/book. Leave us your information and you’ll have it within just a few days. To get your free copy of More Life Than Money so that you can learn about the different Social Security benefits to make sure you don’t miss any, go to providencefinancialradio.com/book, and we’ll get it right out.

My name is Anthony Saccaro, and you’re locked in to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. We’re spending our time right now talking about two different benefits that Social Security offers that are often missed. We just covered the Social Security divorced spouse benefit, and I now wanna change our attention and redirect us to the Social Security benefit, which is known as the divorced survivor benefit.

We should talk about the survivor benefit in general, though, so you understand what that means, and it’s a really easy benefit to understand. And that is that when one spouse passes away, the surviving spouse has the option of keeping the larger benefit. And let me give you an example to illustrate this.

Let’s say that one spouse is earning $2,000 a month in Social Security, and the other spouse is earning $1,000 per month. And the spouse that is earning $2,000 per month passes away. Well, the surviving spouse whose income from Social Security was only $1,000 per month, they’re going to now get that $2,000 per month that the deceased spouse had been getting while that person was alive.

And that’s one of the benefits of Social Security called the survivor’s benefit, or it might be called the widow or widower’s benefit, but it’s the same thing. Either way though, what’s often missed in discussion is that the surviving spouse is going to lose the smaller of the two Social Securities, and that has to be planned for, and oftentimes it’s not.

With that framework in mind though, now we can talk about the divorced survivor’s benefit. As long as you were married for over 10 years before you got divorced, then when your ex-spouse passes away, you’ll be entitled to their full Social Security amount if it’s larger than yours. That is the divorced survivor’s benefit, and most of you don’t even know that that exists.

And if you miss it, the results can be dramatic. I remember meeting with a lady some years ago, probably well over a decade and a half, and when I shared this with her, her mouth dropped because she was in her mid-80s, and she didn’t know about this benefit. It turns out she could have been collecting this benefit for over 20 years, and she wrote me later to let me know that after she had done some calculations, she believed that she might have lost as much as a quarter million dollars of income over the last 20 years because she did not know about this benefit.

If you’re divorced though, and you were married more than 10 years, and your ex-spouse has passed away, then this benefit is available to you, and you don’t wanna miss it. It can be very expensive. If you wanna learn more about the divorced survivor’s benefit or any other benefit that Social Security offers so you can make sure to file at the right time and make sure not to miss any of these benefits, I wanna offer you a copy of my book, More Life Than Money.

I designate an entire chapter to all the different benefits that are offered by Social Security, and many of them I’m sure you’re not aware of. I’ll send it to you free of charge, no cost, no obligation. A copy of More Life Than Money will just show up in a few days on your doorstep. And if you wanna receive a copy, just go to providencefinancialradio.com/book.

Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/book. Leave us your information, and we’ll get it right out to you. You’ll have it in a few days. To claim your free copy of More Life Than Money, one more time, just go to providencefinancialradio.com/book, and you’ll have it shortly.

I’m Anthony Saccaro. Just wanna thank you for joining us for today’s show.

We’ve talked about Trump accounts. We talked about 529 plans. We talked about Roth IRA conversions. We also talked about long-term care and some of the new insurance programs that are out there. And now we just talked about Social Security and a couple of the missed benefits. Once again, thank you for joining us for today’s Providence Financial Retirement show.

We’ll see you back here next week, same time, same place. God bless.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for educational and informational purposes only and reflects a general discussion from a live radio broadcast. It is not intended as personalized financial, tax, or legal advice. Individual circumstances vary, and listeners should consult a qualified professional before making decisions.