Eliminating the Cap on Social Security’s Taxable Wage Base

In 2025, the maximum taxable wage for determining payroll tax (FICA tax) contributions to Social Security (OASDI) is $176,100. This is also the maximum taxable wage for 2025 for determining an individual’s lifetime benefit (primary insurance amount) payable from the system. Under current law, the “cap” is adjusted annually based on the increase in the national average wage index.

Eliminating the cap is perhaps the most popular solution suggested these days for solving most of the system’s short and long-term funding problems. Since it only affects relatively wealthy working Americans, it is a solution that tends to have wide support among lower-paid workers and retirees, consistent with the famous Russell B. Long quote from 1973, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” In this post, we will take a quick look at the pros and cons of eliminating the cap on Social Security’s taxable wage base.

Actuaries Live for Mortality

In this weekend’s Kitces.com Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (July 5-6), Adam Van Deusen discusses three articles concerning the importance of selecting reasonable lifetime planning period assumptions when decumulation planning, as well as stress-testing these assumptions when measuring longevity and mortality risks. He says,

“Ultimately, the key point is that creating a plan based on how long a client will live is most effective when both mortality and longevity risk factors are considered. Actuarial science offers tools that can help advisors assess these considerations so that they can adjust mortality assumptions and longevity expectations as part of an ongoing process of monitoring and updating a plan. And by making these adjustments collaboratively and regularly, advisors can help clients develop a relevant and realistic strategy to manage their mortality and longevity risks as they journey into retirement!”

We totally agree with Mr. Van Deusen, and in this post, we will highlight the mortality/longevity related actuarial tools in our “Actuarial Approach” website that can be of value to advisors and their clients.

Should Your Plan Anticipate Future Social Security Benefit Cuts?

In light of the recent release of the 2025 OASDI Trustees Report, there has been considerable news concerning Social Security’s financial status and the possibility that if Congress does not act prior to the projected exhaustion of the trust fund (2033 for OASI and 2034 for OASDI), benefits may effectively be reduced in the first full year of trust fund exhaustion by about 20% (for OASDI) or about 23% (for OASI). Reductions could increase in subsequent years absent any action by Congress. 

NASI Fumbles Facts Regarding Primary Cause of Social Security’s Funded Status Deterioration

This month, the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) released “Social Security at 90: Policy Options for Strengthening the Program’s Finances and Avoiding Automatic Benefit Cuts.” In their report, NASI examines “lessons from Social Security’s history that can help inform a potential path forward.” With respect to the causes of system’s current long-term financing problem, the report concludes:

“Much of the program’s long-term shortfall stems from the legacy costs of paying benefits to early generations of recipients after the program’s inception. More recently, the further deterioration in Social Security’s financial outlook since 1983 is largely due to the rise in earnings inequality that has eroded the program’s tax base, along with a failure to adjust tax rates in recent decades.”

In this post, we will disagree with NASI’s conclusions with respect to the primary cause(s) of the system’s long-range funded status deterioration and several other suggestions they make. This is a subject that we have written about extensively in the past, and one which we feel compelled respond to by “substituting facts for appearances” (part of the actuarial profession’s motto).

Long-Range Social Security Financing—It’s Worse Than We Predicted

In our post of February 15, 2025, we estimated Social Security’s financial status as of January 1, 2025 using:

• results from the 2024 OASDI Trustees report,
• an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) of the effect of passage of the Social Security Fairness Act,
• our estimate of the effect of the annual actuarial loss to the system resulting from the change in the 75-year projection period, and
• no other changes in assumptions, system provisions or methods

Last February, we estimated that Social Security’s long-range actuarial balance as of January 1, 2025 would be -3.65% of present value of taxable payrolls for the next 75 years (down from -3.50% last year), or a Funded Status (PV of Assets/PV of Liabilities for the next 75 years) of 79.1% (down from 79.8% last year).  Our estimates turned out to be optimistic.

Kitces.com Suggests Advisors Include an Actuarial Approach in their Consulting Toolbelt

In its Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (June 7-8), Kitces.com and Adam Van Deusen included a link to and summary of our April 28, 2025 Advisor Perspectives article, “Advising a Retired Client Who Wants to Buy a Second Home (or Other Big-Ticket Item)”. Mr. Van Deusen did an excellent job summarizing the article and pointing out the benefits of using the Actuarial Approach and its Funding Status metric to measure and communicate the impact of a client’s financial decisions on the sustainability of their plan.

In his summary, Mr. Van Deusen says,

“In sum, financial advisors have more than one tool in their toolbelt when it comes to analyzing the impact of large purchases by their retired clients. And while advisors might not consider themselves to be actuaries, taking an actuarial approach could provide clients with a metric that allows clients to better understand the impact of potential purchases on the sustainability of their financial plan!”

Of course, we like to think that the Actuarial Approach advocated in this website and its Funded Status metric can easily be applied more broadly to all significant financial decisions in retirement, not just potential purchases. We strongly agree with Mr. Van Deusen that the Actuarial Approach would be a good tool to add to the toolbelt of a financial advisor, and we are happy to assist financial advisors who may have questions about the Actuarial Financial Planner Excel workbooks or the Actuarial Approach discussed in our website.

Funded Status—The Better Metric for Managing Assets and Spending in Retirement

As we have indicated many times in prior posts, the future isn’t going to happen as you (or your financial advisor) assume, and your spending goals and actual spending are likely to change over time. Therefore, your retirement plan should include a process for determining when future adjustments to your plan may be necessary. We believe such a process is much more important than any model you may use to project the future.

Planning for Essential Expenses in Retirement

One of the basic tenets of the Actuarial Approach recommended in this website is to fund the present value of expected essential expenses in retirement with non-risky assets/investments like:

• Social Security,
• Lifetime pensions,
• Life annuities,
• TIPs ladders,
• Multi-year guaranteed annuities, etc.

We call the total non-risky assets/investments used for this purpose the “Floor Portfolio,” as distinguished from the “Upside Portfolio” comprised of more risky assets used to fund discretionary expenses. We also refer to these portfolios as “buckets’ for funding essential and discretionary expenses. Recently, in our post of April 26, 2025, we introduced the concept of a third “Surplus” bucket to encourage households to increase spending when their Funded Status exceeds a specified level.

Recently, the Alliance for Lifetime Income released “Check off the Basics—A guide to Planning for Essential Expenses.” Like most of their material, this guide makes a lot of sense. We agree with their proposed approach, as it is very similar to the November, 2021 essay, “A New Approach to Building a Sustainable Retirement Plan Using Proven Actuarial Principles” that we wrote for them. 

Don’t Forget Your Taxes, Part II

This post is a brief follow-up to our post of May 6, 2023 in which we reminded you that taxes are essential expenses that must be planned for in retirement. As is the case with other expenses expected in retirement, you must make assumptions about how your current tax expenses will change in the future to develop a reasonable estimate of the total present value of future household expenses (i.e., household spending liabilities), against which the total present value of household assets is compared to develop your Funded Status.

Are You Still Worried About Increasing Your Spending?

In our last post, we tried to encourage retirees afraid of (or behaviorally resistant to) spending their wealth to consider increasing their spending whenever their Funded Status exceeded a specific threshold percentage. In this post, we will take another shot at increasing your spending comfort level assuming safely increasing spending during retirement is consistent with your spending goals.

The “spend-less” Funding Status guardrail we recommend is 95%, and the “spend-more” guardrail we previously recommended in our post of January 7, 2023 for considering increased spending was 120%. The 150% (or 140%) Funded Status spend-more threshold used in the example in our previous post was considerably higher than our recommended 120% “spend-more” guardrail. We did this primarily to illustrate the process that could be used to transfer assets from one’s “upside portfolio” bucket to a “surplus bucket” whenever the Funded Status exceeded the specified threshold. We have absolutely no problem if you want to use a higher threshold than 120% as your spend-more guardrail, especially if you may be afraid of having to decrease your spending in the future. 

However, in this post, we are going to look at just how conservative the 120% Funded Status spend-more guardrail is by stress-testing it for a hypothetical couple.