TIL in 1989, the US government set $2,000 as the limit for how much money someone with a disability can keep in savings and remain eligible for federal benefits
TIL in 1989, the US government set $2,000 as the limit for how much money someone with a disability can keep in savings and remain eligible for federal benefits
It’s been decades since the government set how much money someone with a disability can keep in savings and still be eligible for Supplemental Security Income benefits.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ssi-rules-families-poverty/
The Supplemental Security Income program (SSI) was created in 1972 under the Nixon administration to provide financial support to low-income seniors and disabled people. An effort to federalize state-level adult support programs across the country, SSI is a means-tested program—there are financial requirements to be eligible. In the case of SSI, as of its last adjustment in 1989, enrollees cannot have savings of more than $2,000 as an individual or $3,000 as a family. Furthermore, SSI beneficiaries are prohibited from having retirement accounts, life insurance policies, certain types of personal property, funeral/burial policies, and access to other types of income.
[emphasis mine]
OMG I'm gonna test some means! 
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeup.
At this point it's an extremely humiliating form of social murder.
Plus - If you apply it'll take a year for your application to get processed. You will be denied. You will then have to appeal, which will take another year, and then you might get some amount of money. I believe it currently has a maximum pay out of something like 10k a year.
How are you supposed to stay alive during those two years? Fuck you, die in a gutter.
If you get married? You immediately lose everything; Your payments, your medicaid, everything. One of my friends didn't know, got married, and then had to get an annulment when their spouse lost all their social welfare.
Murica.
Oh, and the average wait time on social housing, like section 8, for a single man with no children is like 10 years, and that's in places where the system actually functions.
I believe it currently has a maximum pay out of something like 10k a year.
Federally, yes, but some states give more. In California you can make around $14,000, which is very much not enough to afford rent.
Apparently Indiana has the highest payout at 15k annually for some fucking reason.
How are you supposed to stay alive during those two years? Fuck you, die in a gutter.
Exactly. And if somehow you do find a way to work despite your disability just to survive in the years you're waiting and hoping for help, they will use that as proof that you don't need the help and deny your application since clearly you're capable of working! It's just one of the more enraging Catch-22's of the whole ridiculous process, but it's hardly the only one.
These fucking limits that are enacted without mandatory, automatic inflation adjustments really just gives up how much of a sham this country is. Even at the best of times, these "solutions" were just never intended to be supported.
unrelated anecdote about damage limits in criminal statutes
I knew somebody who the cops charged with a fucking 3rd degree misdemeanor over breaking a window while they were drunk - which they'd already paid for - because the bill was >500$ and that was the limit PA had set IN 1991 or earlier (that was the earliest version of the statute with a digitized copy available). Thankfully we got it thrown out, almost certainly because they were white.
Same thing happens with some kinds of theft and shoplifting charges. When the limits were set they were worth vastly more. With inflation the limits are now trivial amounts of money compared to what they were intended to be. But hey, more slave labor for the state amirite?
It's me!
I actually got approved on my first try, without a lawyer or anything. I had many years of medical records, and also had to go to one of their affiliated doctors for a final check-up.
There is one way you can have savings, but you have to have had your disability before the age of 26, and you're only allowed to spend it on certain things. Also your Social Security caseworker will not have heard of this program and you'll just have to hope they don't make it count against you somehow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABLE_account
Another fun fact - if someone buys you dinner, you have to report it, so they can reduce your benefits accordingly.
When benefits are raised or reduced, that happens two months later, so if you managed a desperate attempt to make some money or received assistance, it's dangerous to spend it on what you needed it for, because at ~$8 a day after rent you can't really afford to let that go down two months from now when prices might be even higher than they are now.
Also, you can't pay less than an even share of rent, even if you send them a blueprint of your apartment showing that you have the smallest bedroom, because anything less than an equal split counts as "housing assistance." Your benefits will be slashed accordingly.
Every single fact you've revealed here should be enough for another round of the Nuremberg trials to start and every single elected and appointed member of the US federal government should be tried in them.
There are eight million people on SSI. Who knows how many they've made homeless or killed.
A data analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that from 2014 to 2019, about 48,000 people filed for bankruptcy while trying to get a final decision on a disability appeal. The same report said that from 2008 to 2019 more than 100,000 people died waiting.
Very interesting information, now could you please give me the names, addresses, and approximate neck shear force of the people responsible for this?
There's probably a dozen other restrictions you can add onto this because the list never ends, but one that got me was that you can't get paid while traveling outside the country. Every day you're gone, that's a day they slash off your month's pay. People will ofc say if you're so desperate to be on SSI you shouldn't be taking leisure trips, but this applies to people literally just crossing the border to visit family in Canada or Mexico. And they definitely keep track of when and where you're going and how long you were there. So there's an extra element of social isolation if you happen to be from an immigrant family.
I didn't know that. I thought it only mattered if you were out of the country for 30 days or more. Here's what the FAQ says:
Excerpt
If you leave the United States
Leaving the United States means leaving the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or the Northern Mariana Islands. Usually, if you leave the United States for 30 days or more, you can no longer get SSI.
If you move to Puerto Rico, you’re considered to be outside the United States for SSI purposes only. People who live in American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands cannot receive SSI.
If you plan to leave the United States, tell us before you leave. We need to know the date you plan to leave and the date you plan to come back. Then, we can tell you if your SSI will be affected.
After you have been outside the United States for 30 or more days in a row, your SSI can’t start again until you have been back in the country for at least 30 straight days. There are special rules for dependent children of military personnel who leave the United States. They may be able to get or apply for SSI while overseas. There are also exceptions for students studying abroad.
Source (warning: PDF). After what you've said, that "Then, we can tell you if your SSI will be affected" sounds especially ominous, but this page seems to indicate that benefits aren't affected if the time out of the country is less than thirty days.
I hate this country, this reminded me of last year before my mom died. when she got injured from her workplace, she tried to apply for disability and got denied. and she was worried of going homeless from all her medical bills. she was thinking of getting a disability lawyer to help with this, but her health ended up declining very fast before she could get to that
I'm so sorry, comrade.
Anecdotally, from a friend of mine, everyone gets denied on their first disability application. An attorney is a de facto requirement. Probably intentional in order to cull the numbers. Wonderful system.
I have heard that, and it is pretty evil that they do that. Especially since like. Going to last year, when this happen, my mom hardly could walk, yet they still thought she could work? She needed a walker and she couldn't go far due to her workplace pretty much hurting her back. She couldn't even drive anymore or go to the store. Along with carrying an oxygen tank due to another medical conditions of hers. How could they still think she could still work and not need disability?
I'd joke that they are just mandating disabled people open a savings account under their mattress but in reality they were never going to pay disabled people enough to actually have savings anyway
If they find out you have cash saved anywhere, they will make you pay it back. That is if you don't get convicted of a felony for lying to the SSA/IRS. They even have a hotline people can call to report this "fraud," so snitches can snitch (and they don't even get rewarded).
So hypothetically, what if you gave everything you didn't spend to a land project that was incorporated as a 501c3, and you had permission to go to that land project whenever?
How solid is this idea?
Oh hey this is me! I can't work at all because my disability basically gives me about four hours out of the day where I can sit up, if that. SSDI pays a little under working a 20 hour workweek for me, so it's either: work part-time and feel physically awful or not work and get a low amount of money I'm not allowed to save or invest with.
Any side hustles like doing art commissions or gig work also mean having to pay back what I made or else I lose all benefits. Basically that means doing free labor because I end up with zero more dollars and that's not far from scabbing.
My retirement plan is global warming.
Eugenics shit
I keep saying it: modern day Sparta.
The US loves finding new ways to try to purge the “weak” from society and a scary amount of US citizens think this is a good thing to try to prevent “the weak” from surviving.
If anyone unironically believes in the law of the jungle, they should be forced to return to monke.
Aktion T4 but instead of giving you the dignity of a bullet to the head they make you crawl on your knees begging for life as the machine slowly weighs down on you.
Wait until you learn that women in the United States couldn't open a bank account without their husband's permission until the late 1970s or that disabled people in most states can be paid under minimum wage.
Chuds need to understand this and I wish more would talk about it.
They don't care either way, in their reality of "personal responsibility" there is no room for empathy in a similar was as the liberal thinks that such measures are just and that the oppressed should never demand more. Both are two dichotomies of the fascist state, the hatred towards the weak and the worship of the "process" of the state.
Almost no one knows outside disability and chronic illness circles. The squad tried to get some reforms a few years ago but that obviously ate shit. Idk if it even made it to committee.
It should be $5077 for an individual or $7516 for a family today if adjusted for inflation.
Which is still pathetic obviously, there should be no limit or if you really feel the need to have a limit it should be like, $100k or more, but $5000 would still be such a huge improvement
Permanently Deleted
Definitely a safe assumption. I did the math once for the salary of a SNAP fraud investigator and they would have had to kick something like two dozen full families off benefits every month to even justify their annual pay, let alone overhead, administration . . .
sometimes malice trumps economic incentive.
The health insurance that comes with my SSI just denied coverage for a medication that might help me manage my disability.
Social security won't cover a drug cocktail injected into my spine that I should be getting monthly but it's like $3,000 a shot. It's approved for people with my condition but only if they got it from diabetes. If it's the result of a trauma injury, it's not FDA approved, so it's not covered.
Before I lost that coverage, the doctors and I were looking into weaning me off vicodin. That didn't happen, so now I've been on it for over a decade (you're only supposed to take it for like 6 months at most lmao).
Isn't snap fraud like less than 1%?
MFW once again it’s CHUDs putting holier-than-thou sanctimony over a functioning society and not the people that think racism is wrong.
threadIt seems like every day I learn something new about this terrible country
America is a well of violence and horror with no bottom.
They limit the amount of property you can own here was like... 5k in 2019, which is not thoroughly explained whether that means the current price of things, or what it would get on the second hand market etc etc. You certainly couldn't have a house or apartment until covid when suddenly a bunch of conservative voters were jobless.
AFAIK for the feds you can own one house and one car that won't count against you. And you'll enver have enough money to repair or replace either.
of course I know many people on this and its a catch 22 nightmare but also what they replaced welfare with for white people in the south so they could keep getting money while all black people were kicked off welfare if they couldn't be a slave for mcdonalds or whatever.
And I thought it was hard to get it in the UK.
