My wife and I are late 50s with a Dependent Adult Child. Historically, I have had much higher earnings maxing out in most years. My wife has been in and out of the workforce with lower paying jobs. With a DAC, it seems like our priority should always be maxing out on my SS earnings since our DAC may get 30+ years of those higher benefits (at 75%) after we're gone. While we are all 3 alive, we are likely to be hit with the max family benefit cap if both my wife and DAC are trying to collect. My wife and I now have our own business so we have the ability to pay one of us more than the other. Once we max out my SS wages and my wife is paid her base salary, is it better to bonus additional money to me avoiding any more SS taxes or bonus it my wife paying higher SS taxes now to build up her lifetime earnings record? If her earnings record got close to 50% of mine wouldn't that make it easy for her to use her own SS record leaving more for our DAC? Does your calculator address strategies/scenarios for optimizing the SS tax paid in?

Hi,

I don't have sufficient information to be able to answer your question, but I want to stress that both the IRS and Social Security require accurate reporting of earnings. It's not permissible to report the earnings of one member of a couple under the Social Security number of the other member of the couple. Nor are you allowed to inflate the amount of your earnings by misreporting unearned income as earned income. So, be sure to follow IRS guidelines when you report your and your wife's earnings on your tax returns.

That said, our software (https://maximizemysocialsecurity.com/purchase) does allow you to enter projected future year earnings so that you can gauge the effect of such earnings on your benefit rate. The software should also be particularly helpful to you in planning your best strategy for claiming benefits, analyzing such issues as whether or not you and/or your wife should file early so your adult child can start drawing sooner, and whether or not a combined family maximum will be advantageous in your case.

Best, Jerry