'This Is Your Money, Whether You Know It or Not': Suze Orman Says a Social Security Agent Was '100 Million Percent Wrong' About a Benefit for Divorced Americans

On a recent Women & Money podcast, Suze Orman read a letter from a listener named Susan who was about to turn 67 and was married for 27 years with an ex-husband who “made zillions more” than she had. Susan had called the Social Security Administration (SSA) to ask whether she would do better filing on his record and, by her account, was told she could not do that "until he's dead, or he files for Social Security himself." Orman's verdict was immediate. "Everything that the Social Security agent told her was 100 million percent wrong," she said.

"Doesn't matter if he's remarried. Doesn't matter if he started to collect Social Security or not," Orman went on. "All that matters is that he's 62 years of age and older," that the couple was married 10 years, and that the divorce is at least two years old. Then Orman said the following directly to Susan: “This is your money, whether you know it or not.”

The agency's own published rules support her. The SSA says a person who is 62 or older, currently unmarried, and divorced from someone entitled to retirement or disability benefits may be eligible on that record if the marriage lasted 10 years or more. It adds that "you can apply for benefits on your former spouse's record even if they have not retired, as long as you have been divorced at least two years before applying," and that "the amount of benefits you get has no effect on the benefits your ex-spouse or their current spouse receives." The one condition Orman's summary leaves implicit is the claimant's own status: She has to be 62 and unmarried herself.

The money works as Orman described, with one correction to the number. A divorced spouse who claims at full retirement age can receive up to half of the ex-spouse's full benefit, and the SSA pays whichever is higher: The person's own benefit or the spousal amount. "It will be 50%, because you're 67," Orman told Susan. Claiming earlier cuts it. For someone whose full retirement age is 67, the SSA's reduction table pays 65% of the spousal amount at 62, or 32.5% of the ex's full benefit. Orman put it at "like 35%," which is close but not the agency's figure. And unlike a worker's own benefit, a spousal benefit does not grow for waiting past full retirement age.

The part nobody else has written is how rare the benefit is relative to the people who look eligible. The SSA's Annual Statistical Supplement counts 158,562 divorced spouses of retired workers receiving a spousal benefit in December 2024, 145,959 women and 12,603 men at an average of $965.80 a month, and 48,723 new divorced-spouse awards in all of 2024. Set that against the divorced population. Census survey data analyzed by Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research put the divorced share of Americans 65 and older at 15.2% in 2022, nearly triple the 1990 level which, on a 65-plus population of roughly 59 million, is on the order of 9 million people. The two numbers do not measure the same thing. Most divorced retirees earned a benefit of their own that exceeds half of an ex's, and the Supplement counts people drawing a partial spousal top-up as retired workers, so 158,562 is a floor. The gap shows that a benefit potentially open to millions is drawn in full by a small fraction of them.

Orman's larger argument sits a few weeks earlier, in a June 11 post on her own site. "An argument making the rounds is that you should claim early because Social Security may not be able to pay full benefits after 2034 or 2035 unless Congress acts," she wrote. Her answer was the arithmetic of the early-claiming penalty: "If you choose to start collecting at 62, you receive just 70% of that benefit — a 30% reduction that is locked in permanently." The SSA's schedule agrees for anyone born in 1960 or later, whose full retirement age is 67.

Waiting is not the right answer for everyone. Someone in poor health, without other income, or who simply needs the money at 62 may do better taking it, and the trustees' projection that the program could pay only about 80% of scheduled benefits after the trust fund is depleted is why Orman's argument exists. Dave Ramsey takes the other side, telling followers to claim at 62 and invest the checks rather than wait. Orman's counter is that each year of delay between 67 and 70 adds 8% to a worker's own benefit for life, a guaranteed and inflation-adjusted raise, the kind of patience arithmetic Charlie Munger spent a lifetime preaching. That credit does not apply to spousal benefits, which is why Susan's question and the claim-early debate are two different decisions.

What a reader in Susan's position can do is narrower than either camp's advice. The divorced-spouse rules are published on ssa.gov and the agency's blog, and you can file an application online, by phone, or at a field office. The SSA does not need the ex-spouse's permission, and the ex's remarriage changes nothing. A phone answer is not a determination; a written decision is, and it carries appeal rights.

Orman closed the segment with a second story that her co-host called the “craziest thing” she had ever heard: A man who married four times, each marriage lasting at least 10 years, whose four ex-wives, by Orman's account, each qualified for survivor benefits on his record after he died. "A lot is left on the table," she said. The rule that produced that outcome is the same one that produced Susan's phone call, and it is written down.

On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.