
It’s 7:30 a.m., and you open your bank app with a grin, expecting to see your Social Security deposit slightly higher than last month.
But then… your smile falters. That boost you were counting on has been sliced nearly in half. How did a seemingly minor calculation go so wildly off-track? The culprit is something called COLA—the Cost-Of-Living Adjustment—and a math error that has turned routine retirement planning into a nationwide eyebrow-raiser.