Forest Hill's Jeff Judge in CNBC: the Social Security mistake married couples make alone

By Jeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, Managing Partner, Chesapeake Financial Planners, Forest Hill, MD.

CNBC reported this week that women collect roughly 4,800 dollars less a year in Social Security benefits than men, citing new AARP research. Some of that gap comes from lower lifetime earnings. Some comes from years spent out of the workforce on caregiving. Both are real and both are hard to fix after the fact.

When CNBC asked me about this, I told them something I say to almost every married couple I sit down with: a spouse's claiming decision is not just their problem. When the higher earner dies, the surviving spouse inherits that exact benefit amount. If that benefit was claimed early and locked in at a reduced rate, the survivor lives with that smaller number for the rest of their life, not just for a year or two.

For couples in Harford County and across the Baltimore metro, this matters more than people expect. Women tend to live longer than men on average, so the spouse most likely to feel a bad claiming decision is also the one who has to live with it the longest. I see this show up in retirement plans that otherwise look solid on paper.

The fix is not complicated. Run both spouses' claiming ages together, as one decision, against your actual health and income picture, not as two separate choices made years apart.

This piece builds on "Social Security gender gap means women receive about $4,800 less in annual benefits," in CNBC (June 2026).

Jeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, is Managing Partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners in Forest Hill, MD. Book an intro call.