No because we do not think break even analysis is appropriate and don't include it in our results. Break even analysis determines how many years one needs to live under a patient strategy (that yields higher benefits but begins later) to make up for waiting to collect the benefits, i.e., for not collecting reduced benefits early. This immediately leads to a comparison of the break even age with one's life expectancy -- when one will, on average die. If the break even age exceeds life expectancy, this analysis suggests that waiting to collect is inappropriate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

By delaying receipt of your retirement benefit after FRA up to age 70, you'll earn 8% increases, called Delayed Retirement Credits (DRCs), in your benefit per year. DRCs are calculated and applied on a monthly basis.

Social Security provides longevity insurance -- insurance against living not to one's life expectancy, but far beyond. None of us can count on dying on time exactly at our life expectancy. And from a financial perspective, living to our maximum, not our expected age of life, is the worse case scenario. Why? Because we need to pay for ourselves for many more years than were we to die at the age the actuaries predict.

Being patient when it comes to collecting higher Social Security benefits is a way to help us avoid running out of money before we run out of life. The years of low benefits that we forego yield much higher benefits when we begin collecting. The foregone benefits represent a form of insurance premium payment and the additional benefits we get from waiting represent an additional annuity we are buying from the Social Security system. The terms on which one can buy this additional inflation-protected longevity insurance are extremely favorable -- far better than anything available on the market.

An analogy may help convey our position. Consider homeowners insurance. No one analyzes buying homeowners insurance from a breakeven perspective because we don't have thousands of homes over which to pool the risk of small and worst case losses, such as our house burning to the ground. Because we only have one house, we can't play the odds. We can't decide whether buying a homeowners policy will break even on average. If we made such a calculation we'd never buy homeowners insurance. Why? Because the cost of homeowners insurance always exceeds the expected payout on the policy we buy due to the insurance company needing to charge its fee.

What holds for homeowners insurance holds for longevity insurance. We only have one life to lose, not thousands, so we can't pool risk over when we will die. We will die just once and it may well be at 100 or whatever is our maximum age of life. This is why our software values Social Security benefits through one's maximum, not one's expected age of life. This is not just our company's policy. This is also precisely what the economics and financial theory of longevity risk tells us to do.