If You Invested Every Social Security Check for 10 Years, How Rich Would You Be?

One common criticism of Social Security is that Americans would be much better off financially if the money they paid into the retirement program through payroll taxes were instead invested in private investment accounts. That same argument can be applied to Social Security checks — seniors would have much more wealth if they invested their checks as soon as they got them.

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But is this a reasonable request for most people, especially those on a fixed income? To help find the answer, here is a closer look at how much you could earn by investing your Social Security checks over a decade.

For those seniors who can afford to invest all of their Social Security checks, the potential payoff is considerable. The following table shows how much profit you would have made if you invested every Social Security check over the past 10 years into the S&P 500, from 2015 through 2025 so far.

The data includes the average Social Security check by year as previously reported by GOBankingRates. It also includes the average annual return of the S&P 500 from 2015 to 2025, as cited by Macrotrends (other sources might reflect different returns).

A couple of things to keep in mind: The figures below are based only on yearly averages, which means they don’t include month-to-month fluctuations that happen with the stock market. They also don’t include other types of investments — such as crypto or real estate — that would have produced very different returns.

According to the table above, if you invested all of your monthly Social Security checks in the S&P 500 over the past decade, your nest egg would have grown by over $20,000.

That kind of return should bring cheer to financial gurus, like Dave Ramsey, who recommend applying for Social Security retirement benefits as early as possible. For example, you could start collecting benefits at age 62 instead of the full retirement age of 66 or 67 and then immediately invest every monthly payment.

There’s just one problem with that reasoning. A large percentage of seniors don’t have the financial ability to put their Social Security checks into stocks, bonds, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, real estate, crypto or other investments. They need the money to pay the bills.

For about half of U.S. seniors, Social Security provides at least 50% of their overall retirement income, according to research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. For about one in four seniors, Social Security provides at least 90% of income. These folks have a hard enough time making ends meet, let alone tossing their Social Security checks into various investments that might or might not pay off.

Nonetheless, for retirees who can afford to invest their benefit checks, there’s a pretty good chance those investments will pay off and boost their retirement savings over the long haul.

Vance Cariaga contributed to the reporting for this article.

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: If You Invested Every Social Security Check for 10 Years, How Rich Would You Be?