What Happens to Your Social Security if Your Spouse Dies?

When your spouse dies, you face many major lifestyle changes -- and some of those changes are likely financial.

If you're retired, the change could be a major one if you and your spouse were both collecting Social Security checks, but now your husband or wife has passed on.

So what happens in these situations?

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Here's what happens to your Social Security benefit when your spouse passes away

When your spouse dies, your Social Security benefit may stay the same if you were the higher earner in your household. However, if you earned less than your spouse did, you may want to change to survivor benefits instead.

Survivor benefits become available as early as age 60 (or younger, if you're disabled or caring for the child of your deceased spouse). These could be worth up to 100% of the benefit your deceased spouse was collecting, if they had claimed benefits before death. If your spouse was not yet collecting benefits, you could be entitled to up to the full amount of their standard benefit plus any delayed retirement credits they earned.

If you were collecting spousal benefits, then those will typically switch to survivor benefits upon the death of your spouse. This will most likely increase the amount you're personally collecting from Social Security.

The death of a spouse can mean taking a hit on your household Social Security income

Although your Social Security benefit may increase due to a switch to survivor benefits if your spouse dies, there's no guarantee of this if you were the higher earner. And even if you receive a higher benefit because your spouse died, you'll almost inevitably receive less household income from Social Security after the death.

That's because if both you and your spouse were getting benefits, their death now means you're down to one check coming in instead of the two you had before. This can hit your finances hard, especially if you don't have a lot of money in retirement plans and were relying on those double Social Security checks.

You should prepare for this during your retirement planning process. Typically, this means making sure you have enough invested in your 401(k) or IRA to ensure that either spouse can live comfortably as a widow or widower once one of the two of you passes away.

You can also consider life insurance, or investment options such as a joint life annuity, to ensure that the surviving spouse is provided for. But the most important thing to remember is that you won't always have two Social Security checks coming in for life, and you need to be financially prepared for that reality.

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