Should I Delay Social Security With $3M Saved?

If you’ve already got $3 million saved, why wait until 70 to turn on a check you clearly don’t need? Because the fact that you don’t need it is the whole reason you should wait. Most people with real money claim early for the worst possible reason: the money’s just sitting there, and grabbing it feels like winning. It isn’t.

What you’re actually buying by waiting

Every year you delay past your full retirement age, your benefit grows by 8% for life. Not 8% once. 8% baked into the base, then compounded by the cost-of-living adjustment every year after. The 2026 COLA was 2.8%, and it rides on top of whatever base you locked in. There is no bond, no annuity, no dividend stock that hands you a guaranteed real 8% step-up with the full faith of the U.S. Treasury behind it.

So I stop calling it “income” with clients. It’s insurance. It’s the only inflation-adjusted lifetime payout you can buy without an insurance company skimming a commission off the top. When you frame it that way, claiming at 62 to protect a portfolio you’ll never spend down looks like canceling the cheapest policy in your life because you’re annoyed you haven’t used it yet.

The hidden price most people never see

Here’s the part that gets buried, and it’s the part I care about most. Social Security isn’t really about you. It’s about whichever of you lives longest.

When one spouse dies, the household keeps the larger of the two checks and loses the smaller one. If the higher earner claimed at 62 and locked in a shrunken benefit, the survivor lives the rest of their life on that smaller number. Could be twenty years on it. I’ve watched a widow’s income drop at the exact moment her grief was deepest, because a decision made eight years earlier quietly set the floor for the rest of her life. The first-order math is “what do I collect.” The third-order reality is “what does my spouse live on alone.” Those are different questions, and only one of them matters in the end. This is the core of any honest survivor benefits plan.

When claiming earlier is the right call

I’m absolute on the principle and humble on the prediction, because none of us knows our expiration date. Delaying is a bet that at least one of you lives into your mid-80s, and for a healthy, affluent couple that bet usually pays. But not always.

Claim earlier if a real health issue means your honest life expectancy is short, and your spouse already has a strong benefit of their own. Claim earlier if turning on the check lets you leave a fragile portfolio alone through a brutal early market, which is its own kind of protection. That tradeoff is the heart of sequence-of-returns risk, where the order of your returns can hurt more than the average. And weigh the tax drag, because pulling from IRAs to bridge to 70 can be the perfect window for Roth conversions while your reported income is low.

My take

With $3 million, you have the rarest luxury in this decision: you can afford to wait, so you can buy the biggest check. The math on claiming age is one of the few in retirement that holds up against running the numbers at 62 versus 70 without flinching.

Don’t claim early because the money’s sitting there. The reason it can sit there is the reason it should. Buy the bigger check, and buy your spouse a floor that doesn’t crack the day you’re gone.