Social Security pays stay-home spouse half

DEAR CARRIE: Can you help settle a bet? My friend says that you can collect Social Security benefits even if you have never worked and if your husband is still collecting benefits. I'm not sure she's right. -- Benefits Bet

DEAR BENEFITS: If your friend had some serious money riding on the bet, not only is she right, but she's a little richer.

When you reach retirement age, you can collect half of the benefits your husband is entitled to, said employment attorney Troy Rosasco of Turley Redmond Rosasco & Rosasco in Ronkonkoma.

The Social Security retirement program took effect during President Franklin Roosevelt's administration, and its mission was to protect the elderly from falling into poverty, including women who hadn't worked outside the home, Rosasco said.

"At that time it was very common for the female in the relationship to have never worked," he said. "And we have never taken [that spousal benefit] away."

As with any law, some strings are attached. To receive a Social Security pension based on your husband's benefits, you must have been married for at least 10 years, Rosasco said.

And, yes, you can collect that benefit while your husband is living and "the worker's benefit is not reduced one penny by any amount the spouse receives," Rosasco said.

So if your husband collected $1,500 a month at full retirement, then your spousal benefit would be $750.

But if a worker applies for benefits before reaching full retirement age, the "retirement benefit is then reduced permanently," he said. The age of full-retirement varies depending on a recipient's birth date.

If you had worked, and would be entitled to less than half of your husband's benefit, you could collect the equivalent of half of his.

"The Social Security mantra is, "We always give the person the better of the two," he said.

Even a divorced man or woman of retirement age would be entitled to a benefit equal to half of their ex-spouse's Social Security pension, if the latter benefit exceeds what the man or woman would have otherwise collected. But again, they would have had to have been married for at least 10 years. 

DEAR CARRIE: We run a small pool service company. Our seasonal workers use hand tools such as screwdrivers and extension cords to do their jobs.

We've had problems in the past with workers losing their tools, and it has become quite expensive to replace these items. Can we require the workers to supply their own tools to do the job? Or if we supply the tools, can we make workers pay to replace any that are lost? -- Legal Tools Rules?

DEAR TOOLS: The answers are "yes" and "no," respectively.

An employer may require employees to buy their own tools for their job, as long as the cost of the tools doesn't violate minimum wage or overtime wage laws in a workweek, said attorney Ellen Storch, counsel at Kaufman Dolowich Voluck & Gonzo in Woodbury.

In other words, the required purchases would be illegal if the employees' wages minus the costs put the workers below the federal and state minimum of $7.25 an hour in a workweek or if the costs cut into any overtime pay due that week.

As to your second question, state labor law makes it a big no-no to deduct the cost of tools from a worker's pay or even to demand a separate payment.

"This law prohibits any deductions from wages unless they are for the employee's benefit [like insurance premiums] and are expressly authorized in writing by the employee," Storch said.