By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Over 3 million Social Security recipients affected by the Social Security Fairness Act will experience some changes to their benefits starting with a lump sum payment by the end of the month. Here with more is Yahoo Finance’s own Carrie Hannon. Carrie, who should be expecting that lump sum payment?
00:17 Carrie Hannon
Yeah, Brad, this is it’s complicated, but um, it is this is aimed at public sector worker workers such as firefighters or police officers, teachers who had a pension, uh, who have a pension with the government and uh, they also had Social Security benefits from they had a part-time summer job or what have you, where they were paying into Social Security on that income stream. And it sort of makes right the fact that that they were um, their social security benefit was reduced because of having that pension, the way that the math went. So it impacts people who are retirees, who are surviving spouses or spouses of people in this category. So as you mentioned, around three million people. And what will happen is there’ll be a retroactive payment for a lump sum that for 2024 that will hit accounts by the end of this month. And the government, you will get a social security administration will send a letter talking about this and explaining it. It’ll go to the bank account that they have for you. Um, and then moving forward, starting on the April check, there’ll be a bump up in what that social security security payment is each month. So this is this is a good thing, but again, it’s a little a little bit complicated, but it could be up to $1,000, but it really depends on, you know, the type of social social security benefit you’re talking about and so forth and when you retired those kinds of things.
02:15 Speaker A
And so, according to the memo, the Trump administration will now require seniors to verify their identity in person or online rather than by phone. How should seniors prepare for that change?
02:28 Carrie Hannon
Yeah, Brad, this is actually a really big deal and it’s going to impact a lot of seniors. Uh, the the point here is now you used to be able to verify your identity uh, on the telephone if you had an issue with your social security payment, you wanted to initiate starting getting your benefits, so forth. Uh, now, if you don’t have access to doing it online, which is the way they want you to do it with a my social security account, um, then you need to actually go into an office. Now, if you live in a rural area, you are miles and miles away from from a social security uh, administrative office. In addition to that, many seniors don’t have internet access. They live in a rural area that doesn’t even have that or they’re not tech savvy or they have a disability of some sort. This is going to impact a lot of people, especially with them talking about shuttering offices around the country. So this is something we’re going to see some push back on, I believe. But right now they say you need to show up in person, you need to have a driver’s license or a passport or some sort of government uh, state ID that that verifies who you are and you have to show up in person, make that appointment and go actually into the office.
04:07 Speaker A
All right, some really valuable tips there. Thanks for breaking this down for us, Carrie. Really appreciate it.