On a recent Women & Money podcast, Suze Orman read a letter from a listener named Susan who was about to turn 67 and was married for 27 years with an ex-husband who “made zillions more” than she had. Susan had called the Social Security Administration (SSA) to ask whether she would do better filing on his record and, by her account, was told she could not do that "until he's dead, or he files for Social Security himself." Orman's verdict was immediate. "Everything that the Social Security agent told her was 100 million percent wrong," she said.
"Doesn't matter if he's remarried. Doesn't matter if he started to collect Social Security or not," Orman went on. "All that matters is that he's 62 years of age and older," that the couple was married 10 years, and that the divorce is at least two years old. Then Orman said the following directly to Susan: “This is your money, whether you know it or not.”
