I’m always amazed by the number of emails I get from people who have been getting benefits for 10 years, or 20 years, or even more -- and now they are coming to me with questions about their benefit amount. Or to be more precise, they are telling me some version of this lament: “I think I’ve been paid incorrectly for all these years!”
I think what’s going on is this. They’ve probably always had nagging doubts about their Social Security benefit. And over the years, they’ve just sort of grudgingly accepted the fact that they are most likely being paid correctly. But then one day, they see this Social Security column in their newspaper and the columnist (that would be me) says he'll answer people’s questions about Social Security. So, they fire off an email to me, venting their years-long, sometimes decades-long frustrations, hoping against hope that I will be able to fix their perceived problems.
