SETXSeniors.com Guest Columnist Oscar Garcia  is a Public Affairs Specialist with the Social Security Administration. You can direct your questions to him at: SSA, 411 Richland Hills Drive, San Antonio, Texas, 78245. You can also email him at Oscar.h.garcia@ssa.gov.

Question:
I am 65 and enrolled in Medicare. Can I still use the Social Security retirement estimator to figure my benefit amount?

Answer:
Yes, you can still use the Retirement Estimator. To use the Retirement Estimator, you must have enough Social Security credits to qualify for benefits and you cannot currently be receiving benefits. Hard to believe, but it has been five years since Social Security’s Retirement Estimator debuted. Within months of first becoming available, the online Estimator was praised as one of the best services on the Internet, and it has consistently retained its excellent rating every year. Results from the American Customer Satisfaction Index show Social Security’s online Retirement Estimator is consistently one of the highest-rated services on the web — even higher than the websites of many other public or private sector agencies and companies, including Netflix and Amazon. Every year millions of people use the Retirement Estimator. You can too at www.socialsecurity.gov/estimator. Prefer to do your business in Spanish? You can find it at www.segurosocial.gov/calculador, too. The Retirement Estimator is a convenient, secure, and quick financial planning tool that lets workers calculate how much they might expect to receive in Social Security benefits when they retire. The attractive feature of this calculator is that it uses your earnings information on file at Social Security without displaying your personal information. So you get an instant, personalized estimate of your future retirement benefits. The Estimator even gives you the opportunity to run different scenarios and “what if” situations. For example, you can change the date you expect to retire or change expected future earnings to create and compare different retirement options. This can help you as you plan ahead.

Visit the Social Security website for more information