Mistake No. 1: Not tracking your wages

You could be decades away from claiming your Social Security, but you’d still be making huge mistakes by not keeping track of your early earnings. Because the amount of Social Security benefits depends strictly on your earnings record, if that record isn’t correctly done, you might not receive the benefits you could’ve.

While errors can happen for many unknown reasons, including an employer that reports the number of earnings incorrectly or your earnings don’t even show up because you got married or divorced and your name change hasn’t been processed correctly. And the last thing you want to happen is to lose anything because of such a minor mistake.