In order for disabled people to receive any sort of financial assistant for their housing, food, bills, medical supplies, etc., they cannot ever have more than $2,000 of resources to their name. Ever.
It doesn’t matter what it’s for.
You’re saving up for a new wheelchair?
For college?
To put a downpayment on a house?
Hell man, you just happen to budget for once in your life so that you can have some extra money in case something bad happens?
Your benefits immediately get cut off if you’re a cent over $2,000.
And, even worse, you usually end up having to pay back every dollar the government gave you that month.
So say you get $400. If they find out you’re twenty dollars over the resource limit, you have to give them all $400 back and you undergo an investigation of your funds to see if you will continue getting money.
“What if I spend the money that day?”
Doesn’t matter. In fact, from what I can tell, people who do this are actually put under investigation for fraud.
And yes, this system literally kills people.
Remember when “Guardians of the Galaxy” came out? one of Rocket Racoon’s creators, Bill Mantlo, suffered an accident in 1992 and has irreparable brain damage.
before the movie came out, Marvel gave him an exclusive preview screening. SOme people were upset because they felt if Marvel was really wanted to thank mantlo, they should have donated money to Mantlo’s family.
Bill Mantlo’s brother had to come out and explain: If Marvel gave them monetary aid, Bill Mantlo would lose his financial assistance.
That’s so utterly depressing.
disgusting
I have friends on welfare who won’t pick up a penny in the street because they’d risk the welfare they struggled to get for 10 years.
oh look another fucked up thing in this world. let’s just add it to the list. number 63858b
My brother has been on California State SSI for autism for the last 10 years, and he absolutely has to (no joke, HAS TO) spend all 720 bucks of his SSI every month, because if he puts it in the bank he risks losing his SSI altogether.
Sometimes, at the end of the month, he has no idea what to do with his money because the whole month went by and he still has 400-ish bucks in his account, and he fucking panics because he doesn’t want to get anywhere near 2,000.
And here’s the funnest part of the story!
One day he did a huge commission on Second Life and wound up earning 1500 bucks off of it, and he told the guy to donate it 500 bucks at a time over 3 months. The guy didn’t want to, and just donated all 1500, which put my brother at 2,036 bucks.
The state IMMEDIATELY (I’m talking less than an hour) called him up to tell him over the phone that they were canceling his SSI, because they noticed he had gone over the 2,000 buck threshold. He had to tell them that someone had made a charitable donation to him and that this was not a common occurrence in any way shape or form, and upon not believing him, my mother had to call to talk to them as his legal caretaker and say basically the same thing until they called off the cancellation of his SSI money.
He also had to cancel his renter’s assistance because it put him to 1,062 a month, so if he went 30 days without spending any money they’d cancel his SSI altogether. Like, none of us in the family have any fucking clue why that regulation is in place and it’s the stupidest shit in human history.
Please, legal side of Tumblr, tell me what positive reasoning this law has?
It’s not just money, though. Things you own can count against your resource limit as well provided that they’re not exempt and provided that they’re worth money.
Also, the rules about what is and is not exempt from being counted against your resource limit are incredibly vague and deliberately open to interpretation. Even things that are normally exempted like clothing or furniture could be deemed non-exempt if a capricious bureaucrat decides that it’s actually worth too much money and thus counts as an ‘investment.’
As someone who receives SSI this causes me a huge amount of stress.
This is so unbelievably fucked up
don’t couples have to divorce sometimes because their combined income disqualifies them from assistance?
Conservatives: be more frugal and save money instead of asking to get paid more
Also conservatives: if you save money you’re a sneaky thief and a fraud
To 1up: yes and those of us on disability already can’t get married
Genuine question: How do they know? I’m not doubting that SSI/Disability is extremely strict and they will find out if you go over your allowed asset amount, but… How does SSI or the Disability department of your state know when you get over $2000?
Does SSI/Disability have some sort of system that monitors the bank accounts of everyone on disability and automatically sends out a warning when someone goes over??? Or do they have rooms full of people manually checking bank account balances every hour?? Like… how do they know?? Is it magic?
I’m genuinely curious about this.
They aren’t telling. Nobody I have ever spoken to knows for sure.
The hardest part is getting approved in the first place – once you are certified disabled, which is a H U G E pain in the ass, THEN you go through the process of verifying your income, and that is pretty thorough, involving bank records, taxes, any sort of receipts for work you’ve done, etc.. Once that’s done, they check in periodically to see if there are any changes.
FROM WHAT I UNDERSTAND, for your first year or so, they monitor you AND your spouse pretty directly, looking at your accounts throughout the year. Then they do spot checks of your bank accounts AND your spouse’s at reevaluation, which they can do at any time but I am led to understand (again, they don’t tell you this) typically happens at 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years, and whenever they have reason to believe that you have had a change in circumstances or whenever they feel like it, for as long as you are on disability.
THAT I AM AWARE there is no auto-monitoring of my bank accounts – things may be different for other people, or for people on SSDI, not SSI (they are both run by Social Security, but they are not the same! and it is possible to have much larger payments with SSDI, because the government values people who have ever been able to work more than people who are so disabled they have never been able to). I say this because if there were, I would have noticed.
When I was married, my ex and I had income that would spike, then decline over several months. Basically, every 3 months we’d wind up with $3,000 in the bank and we’d have to make that last. We frequently wound up over the threshold, obviously, and nothing was ever automatically tripped. OKDHS/SNAP hated this, since they work off pay stubs and perpetually had difficulty understanding our setup, but Social Security, which serves a TREMENDOUS number of people and thus I suspect doesn’t have the resources to process monthly or even quarterly evaluations for every person using it, never made a fuss. (Again, SNAP – and Medicaid for that matter – is not run by Social Security, it’s state by state, not federal, and guidelines and rules are different state to state. SSI and SSDI are federal, although you will always be dealing with your local branches, which may have rules that vary, IDK.)
This is not to say that there may not be automatic monitoring, there may, DO NOT RELY ON THE IDEA THAT THERE ISN’T, don’t take the chance, but it was never tripped by the weird way our income came in.
They rely on self-reporting for a lot of it, but they can pull your records, all of them, anytime they like. If they get twitchy, they can check and see what you’ve been doing. If they don’t like your answers, they will look more closely. And if they find something they don’t like, the penalties can be pretty severe. Certainly you won’t be getting any more assistance again, ever, and if you make a “mistake” worth more than $1,000, they could call that a felony and put you in prison if they wanted to. So even though it’s reliant largely on self-reporting, it isn’t worth it to lie significantly.
The most visible part of the monitoring are the phone calls. You get a letter that tells you when to be available for the call, and you have to be there to take it, or call to arrange an in person interview. They ask you about everything. Royalties, inheritances, do you own land, do you own shares in a railroad, do you bring in money from oil drilling, how many cars do you have and what are they worth, how much money do you have in your change jar, do you have any money saved up in a sack and if so how much? Child support? Alimony? You aren’t saving money for your kid to go to college, are you? Who lives with you? Who are they to you? Who pays the bills? Is it you? Do you rent or own? How much is your rent or mortgage? What are your medical expenses? How much do you spend on bills each month (never mind that bills fluctuate throughout the year)? On food? Do you work? Do you volunteer? Where, and how much? Student? Financial aid? It’s a five or ten minute call without children, without answering yes to any of these questions and provoking more questions, depending on how fast they talk, and they ask you so many questions.
So yeah to a great extent between their periodic intensive checks they rely on you self-reporting income. It’s tempting to say that oh, wow, you’d really have to be stupid to report that $200 of don’t-starve money your mom gave you, and on the one hand that’s absolutely true. It’s cash. Spend it, don’t even look at the bank, they’ll never know. On the other, there’s that fear; if they decide to take a good hard look at your bank history and don’t like what they see, even if what they see is that you don’t have e n o u g h money to pay your bills (but somehow you are? how are you doing that? we give you $500 but your rent alone is $350 and you say you spend $120 on groceries and also pay $300 in utilities, WHERE IS THAT MONEY COMING FROM? better take a look!), they could jack your payments around and destabilize the whole house of cards and you’d get yourself fucked over but good. You don’t want to give them ANYTHING to find, or you will lose all your support, so yeah, after what it takes to even get certified as disabled, a lot of people ARE afraid and WON’T risk picking up a fuckin’ penny for fear they will be caught trying to survive.
It seems like you’d be able to slip a lot past them, and people could, I guess, but the thing is, to get the money you have ALREADY been certified as disabled, and that’s VERY hard to get, and that itself functions as a very effective deterrent to fraud. If all people had to do was prove low income to get this assistance, that would be easy and people would absolutely ravage the system taking advantage of that. But no, to get disability payments you have to have a disability first, and I can tell you having been through that process it is nearly fucking impossible to fake it well enough to fool the people evaluating you, and the proof of that is that so many genuinely for real very disabled people cannot get approved for disability. The truth is that for the most part it is only desperate people who will put themselves through the grueling certification process. Not people wanting to fake up a few hundred bucks a month.
It’s a garbage system literally built to be hostile to us. It’s mostly blind and thoroughly incompetent, can barely tell what it’s doing most of the time, but God help you if you come to its attention in a negative way.
ETA: I want to add that I am not sure it works like this for everyone. I fully believe people who say they were cut off the instant they went over $2k, but I’m not sure what exactly is going on that it doesn’t happen every time for everyone.
The plain inconsistency of it is infuriating, it makes it impossible to plan your life to your own best advantage.
Nava 