Social Security: The Best and Worst Years To Be Born

[DFW]

26. I was born in 1952

I applied for Social Security payments when I turned 70. I had started working at age 23, and have been with the same employer since then. It took well over a year to get all the paperwork done, going through about seven different SS offices, from D.C. to Albuquerque to Baltimore, etc. finally ending up with the FBU office in the US Embassy in Warsaw, Poland (!!), and they were the ones who ended up being the ones to actually complete the process.

My SS monthly payments are supposedly about $4100, which, after paying German taxes on 85% of it, leaves a net of about $2350, or about $28200 a year, before the SS tax of about $9900 a year being taken out of my U.S. paycheck, leaving me with about a net of $18,300 per year from the whole SS system. It's better than nothing, so I'm not complaining, but when some think that getting a gross payout of $48,000 a year means having a nice wad of cash, if you're still working and living in a high tax country like Germany, it's more like a nice chunk of extra pocket money.