The way Social Security currently works, is that every who reaches retirement age calculates their retirement benefit based on their 35 highest years of income. So if you get your FICA taxes refunded, you might be replacing one or more years with qualifying wages with years of no wages. This might cause you to end up your working career with fewer than 35 years of Social Security wages, which would, in turn, cause the retirement benefit you ultimately receive to decrease.

There are some good tools available at the Social Security Administration website, www.ssa.gov. One tool lets you tinker with assumptions and gives you an estimate of your specific retirement benefit.

Please let us know what you learn if you spend some time using these on-line tools.

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