The current thinking on retirement seems to be that more and more people will continue to work into their retirement. That makes the official retirement start date even more confusing.

If you leave your job and start a business, are you retired? If you cut back to part time, are you retired?

One way to think about it is this: once you start collecting Social Security and your 401(k) or pension money, you're at least a little retired.

But making that decision is tough. There are strategies for starting your pension withdrawals that will let you tap that money, without penalties, before you hit the magic age of 59. And by monkeyeing with your Social Security start date, you can make your checks bigger forever, or make them last longer than ever.

Because the Social Security and pension rules are as arcane and complicated as possible, it's very hard to come up with rules of thumb for people coasting toward their retirement start dates. But there are calculators to show you exactly how much money you can claim, so you don't have to guess.

To determine your Social Security benefits, go to the Social Security Administration Web site (www.ssa.gov). There you'll find calculators that will give you figures on how much you'll reduce your monthly benefits if you start early, and how much bigger you can make them if you defer your official retirement start date.

You can also pull money out of an IRA account before you turn 59-1/2 by establishing a withdrawal stream that allows your money to last your lifetime. That's required by rule 72(t), and you can get quick and close estimates of how much money you could legally pull out of your account every month at www.72.net.

Once you have the numbers, you can think about the odds and the best strategies. If you're still working, and you don't want to quit, don't start taking your Social Security payments until you at least hit your normal retirement age (still 65 this year but going up soon). That's because there is a stiff penalty for being under the so-called "full retirement age" and collecting both benefits and a paycheck.

If you are over 65 and still working, you can collect benefits without penalty. But Richmond, Virginia, financial planner David Hultstrom tells his clients that if they are on the cusp of not being able to afford the retirement they want, they should delay getting their benefits.

That will make their benefits bigger. For example, a 65-year-old earning $40,000 today could retire with monthly benefits of around $1,057, or wait until age 70 and collect $1,515 every month. Both figures, of course, would go up for inflation.

But those who can afford to stop working and can't wait to start collecting those benefits often do better by starting early. The Social Security Web site calculator does a break-even analysis, which often demonstrates that the early bird gets the bigger bucks over the long haul. At some income levels, some people have to get well into their 80s before their lifetime Social Security haul is larger because they deferred starting their benefits.

Finally, if you're married, you should do this calculus together, says San Francisco adviser Norman Boone. Often, the best choice for a couple is to have the family member with the longer life expectancy postponing benefits, while the one with the lower life expectancy can start benefits earlier. Of course, people don't always live precisely as long as the tables say they should, so it makes some sense to consider how you would be able to afford that longer-than-expected retirement or period of living as a widow or widower.

Of course, this is a decision that should be informed by math but not dictated by it, which might explain why most Americans just take their benefits as soon as they possibly can, calculators be damned.

That's not so terrible. After crunching numbers for many clients and a whole series of hypothetical cases, Hultstrom determined that the difference between starting now or starting later, held over a lifetime of collecting benefits, isn't all that great. "Whichever direction you go, you're not making a huge mistake," he said.

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