As baby boomers start retiring, more and more financial advice is being presented to them, some of it good, some not so good. One specific piece of advice that’s shown up more and more lately is this: if you retire early, delay drawing your social security payments so you can get a larger check when you do start drawing.

The Social Security Administration itself encourages this by sending out statements showing that if you start social security at 62 you’ll get about $1,500/month, whereas if you wait until you’re 66 (the “full” retirement age for most boomers) you’ll get around $2,100/month (this is a fairly typical example for a professional who has “maxed out” social security pay-ins; the same logic applies to everyone). Six hundred dollars a month extra just for waiting? Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

Not so fast. Let’s look at two sets of people: those who can afford to retire early, and those who are forced to retire early (illness, layoff, etc.).

If you can afford to retire early, you probably don’t need your social security payments just to get by. What if you collected the payments for four years and invested them in a CD or a Canadian royalty trust? This would put you more than $70,000 ahead of someone who decided to delay social security until the age of 66. How long will it take them to catch up? It depends on factors like inflation, but it will be a minimum of 10 years and could be as many as 16.

You read that right. Someone who delays social security will not catch up to your accumulation (even ignoring the interest you might receive) until they’re 76, maybe 82. In the meantime they could, to put it gently, expire. For specifics on this, check out the retirement calculator.

What if you’re in that second set of people, and get laid off from your job? That extra $600/month could come in real handy. The problem is, to get it you have to go for four years with nothing. Social security was designed as a safety net. If you need it, use it. If you don’t, take it early and invest it. It doesn’t pay to wait.