How to Maximize SSI SSDI Benefits

thank you for being here mike thank you tadra good to see you again as always and thank you everybody for joining us today um i have been tasked and have accepted the challenge of trying to talk a little bit about social security disability and ssi benefits um so let me start off kind of briefly introducing myself as tajer indicated i am board certified this is what i do um to you know support my family and keep a roof over our head but beyond that it is also something that i really do enjoy i put a lot of pride a lot of effort into it social security disability takes up about 95 of my practice i also do a little bit of workers compensation benefits but at this point i'm 16 years in and that's kind of the two areas where i'm i'm you know limiting myself to um i'm here in winston-salem middle part of the state but i handle cases all over the state of north carolina i've handled cases up and down the east coast i have clients in maine and florida and ohio but again the bulk of my practice is right here in north carolina what i want folks to do if they can while i'm kind of finishing up this this introduction part if you can't grab a piece of paper and a pencil i'm not asking you to take notes but we may hit on a topic that you might want to scribble down a few notes on uh conversely i will give out my uh contact information feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns i do have to give some sort of blanket disclaimer this is the lawyer coming out of me basically something along the lines of this is not specific legal advice this is not advice given to your case specifically this is just general information and we are not forming any sort of attorney-client privilege by participating in this zoom conference nonetheless if you need anything you're welcome to reach out to me i do want to say thank you to disability rights nc they do such a wonderful job um you know you start to when an organization has been around for as long as they have been and has done some amazing things across the state of north carolina you start to almost take them for granted uh they haven't always been here funding isn't always guaranteed money is tight so this is my one little spiel and they did not ask me to do this but if you ever are in the need or want to to donate even if it's five dollars please feel free to reach out to disability rights nc or another organization who is helping disabled folks across the state of north carolina um if you've got that piece of paper i'm gonna give you my my information i'll do it again at the end so don't worry we can probably even put it in the chat but my email is m the letter m shay s h a y law law at outlook.com so that's mshaylaw.outlook.com alright so when i when we talked about this a month ago we initially had a plan to uh bring in an audience that was primarily folks who are getting disability benefits getting ssi benefits getting title ii benefits but also engaged in some sort of maybe part-time work maybe gig work maybe the artistic community the music community here in winston-salem we have a huge huge uh art population and i have had many clients over the years who are artists or were artists i have had clients who have gotten disability benefits and have continued to work in some capacity um so that was the beginning and that's still going to be a big focus of what we're doing here but it's my understanding that that i think we have close to 100 people on this call and not everybody is an artist receiving disability benefits we have folks from a variety of backgrounds we have folks who might not be getting disability benefits at all we also have folks who to my understanding are employed by government agencies maybe the department of health and human services we may even have a few social security employees on the call um all are welcome and i'm glad that we can have this kind of discussion because this is this is an important topic in something that you if you go online and search you can quickly get confused um i'm board certified i've done this for 16 years i had to prepare for this because a lot of these topics are very unclear um what i want to talk about i was talking with my son about his schoolwork last night i have an eight-year-old who's in third grade and he was wanting to jump ahead in math and he was wanting to go ahead and get into this division problem but i had seen the very simple stuff that he was supposed to be doing earlier today or yesterday at school and he got eight out of ten correct and while he was wanting to jump ahead and kind of get to the pinnacle of of what he thinks math is you know i was talking with these building blocks and how it was important we got to set the standard we got to get this base we have to have these building blocks before we can get to where we need to be so my goal at some point sooner than later with y'all is to talk about disability benefits and ways you can maximize whether it's through work or other ways i want to get there but let's start off briefly talking about what is social security disability what is ssi um at the end we will have time for questions so feel free to put them in the chat and to the extent we can get to them as long as they're not too specific to your situation um we can hopefully handle some questions another reason why i ask you to get that pen and piece of paper because we're going to do a math problem all right we're going to actually work through a hypothetical situation of somebody who is getting disability who has a little bit of income and see how it might affect them at the end of the month uh all right so social security disability the standard is is pretty vague um but when you peel all the kind of layers back it boils down to is there an individual who has a combination of medical impairments or related medical limitations um and that makes it to the point where they are unable to hold down gainful employment you know consistent work that's what social security disability is looking at by and large for adults kids is a different situation but for adults can you work or not because of your medical impairments um the process is frustrating and i suspect we have folks on this zoom call right now who have gone through a disability application process at some point in their life maybe you're one of the ones that got approved right off the bat you didn't have to fight with social security you didn't have to go get some fancy lawyer off a billboard um that that's happening unfortunately less and less particularly over the past 10 years or so most everybody who's applying for social security disability is getting denied when you get denied you got to call me you've got to call some lawyer and you've got to start this appeal process and it's frustrating and it takes forever and your file just kind of sits in places that it doesn't need to be sitting and the the bureaucracy of social security tends to start rubber stamping denials without really considering you as a person and think about what i'm saying here looking at you as a person you know unfortunately for most folks who go through the social security process you're a number you're a stack of medical records you're not a real person with real life problems and part of what you have to do during the appeal process to get approved for disability is you have to show them hey i'm more than these medical records this is how my problems affect me day in day out every single day in my life i'm having these problems they affect me at home they affect my ability to go out and hold down a job if you can do that then whether on your own or with the help of a lawyer maybe you've gone through successfully and you've gone to a hearing even and you had some judge you've never seen staring at you and your lawyers asking questions and the judge is asking questions and you're treating it almost like a counseling session i mean you're talking about life as best you can you're nervous your heart's beating you're anxious you didn't sleep at all for the past two days and here you are you know it's all on the line um that's the disability process and it's frankly my job shouldn't exist i should be doing something else you should need a lawyer to go through and prove that you have these medical problems that you have these limitations but that's our system that's the way it's set up um the medical standard is the same for everybody and what i mean by that for any adult regardless of your work history regardless of your education regardless of your age i mean it's the standard is still the standard it boils down to whether or not you can work i want to spend a quick second talking about the two different types of disability and then i'm going to try without being too technical to really address one type of disability with a few rules and then another type of disability and i'm going to use these interchangeably there's a title to disability which is what most folks think of it it is called social security disability there's another type called title 16 supplemental security income that's most people call ssi so for what we're going to be doing miss martin we're going to talk about disability and we're going to talk about ssi and i'm going to try when it's important i'm going to try to point out the differences because there might be somebody on this call who has no clue what type of benefits they're getting they know they get some social security in once a month um there may be other folks who know for a fact well i'm getting entitled to i'm getting disability based on what i paid into the system other folks might say well no i've never worked in my life so i'm getting ssi so let's real quick try to kind of straighten some of that out title ii disability generally speaking is for folks who have worked a certain amount of time and paid a certain amount of uh not necessarily money but a certain amount of quarters into the system the general rule and this changes for folks in who are younger and in their 20s but the general rule is if you've worked 10 years which is 40 quarters then you can draw a title ii disability so every check that you've ever earned they've taken money out right you didn't give it to them they took money out of your check under the theory that they're going to set it aside for you and it'll be there later um so if we're lucky enough to have worked and paid into the system and you're approved for disability then there's just a simple algorithm based on how much you've paid in and how much you've worked and that's what you kind of get back in return unfortunately there are a lot of folks who either haven't paid enough in for whatever reason or they're younger or they've had disabilities from childhood into adulthood where work just hadn't been an option the other program that we're talking about today is called ssi ssi has a couple little tricks to it and we're going to start off real quick with an ssi trick that i see all the time this is a pitfall they look at your resources they look at your household for ssi you can't have more than a couple thousand dollars in a bank account if you're married the number is three thousand this is for ssi only not disability this is just for ssi benefits they look at your housing situation are you living with somebody rent free if you are they're going to knock your check down by one-third if i'm getting ssi benefits now i'm living at my sister's house sleeping on her couch she's you know but for the grace of god she's letting me stay there um they're gonna ding me they're gonna knock my my monthly benefit down one third we'll talk about kind of an exception to that if we have time ssi folks are also subject to things like uh [Music] other resources me as an ssi recipient i can own my house i can own my dog i can own one car i can own the stuff in my house but if i have any other piece of land if i have a second vehicle a third vehicle no matter how even if it doesn't run if i have other things they will use that against me to kick me off of ssi until i fix it until i figure it out i'm allowed certain things but i can't have too much and think about that i'm thinking about how unfair that is all our life we've talked we've been taught save set aside budget right do you know do what you need to do to save for a rainy day but with the ssi program you you get penalized if you try to do that and you are outside of your allowable resources that's a topic in and of itself i mean that's something we can spend two hours on i've gone to legal education seminars that are just about ssi resources and had folks from all over the country opined about strategizing and what to do with that we can't do that on this zoom call i just want to highlight the fact that if you are an ssi recipient they scrutinize you unnecessarily uh hard they're going to look at your household they're going to look at your assets your income your resources um so when we're talking about disability and work which is kind of what i want to hopefully focus on for the next you know however long we have um there's a general rule and miss martin over at disability rights can tell you when you go through law school there's always a general role and that's the role that they teach you but then there's like a thousand different exceptions to that rule and that's just where lawyers come into play um the general rule for work when you're talking about social security disability is that if in 2021 if you were earning more than 1 300 and ten dollars a month then you're engaged in what's called substantial gainful activity and that is a term of art that social security has come up with acronym is sga so if you're making a little over thirteen hundred dollars you are gainfully employed for social security disability purposes and why is that important well i mean that's that's it that's that's that's the crux of what what social security is looking at because if you're holding yourself out as i'm applying for disability but you're working and earning thirteen hundred dollars social security's gonna say uh if you've already been approved for disability you're getting your monthly check you successfully went through the process and then social security catches wind of you earning thirteen hundred dollars a month they're gonna they're gonna have a problem with that now keep in mind this is the general rule and we're going to work off of this general rule i'm not going to go into the the details there's manuals there's there's a something that us disability lawyers use called poms i mean it's a it's a manuscript that we're talking a foot of just pages and pages and pages of information about what we're trying to cover here and i don't expect you nor do i want to go into all these details but i want you to know that there are some exceptions to work you can work let me say that again you can work and get disability benefits you can work and get ssi benefits all right let that sink in that's our general role that's what we're going to move forward on if anything when you walk away from this i want you to remember that you have to report report report report anything to social security and that's always been i've had clients i have clients right now right now that i i know have an issue with reporting things to social security and if i'm being honest they have an issue with reporting things to me i would like for them to be a little more upfront with me about certain things work stuff in particular you have to report let me tell you what you have to report earnings yes any money you got coming in you need to report it income but it goes beyond that you gotta report your when your address changes if you get married if you get divorced you get a new bank account i mean think about that everybody on this call who's getting social security or ssi benefits it's going directly into your bank account isn't it so that changes we got to let social security know if your name changes if you have kids if you're convicted of a crime if you go to jail uh if you get money from a pension all of this stuff i mean the list goes on and on and on all of this stuff needs to be reported to social security let's talk about that i shouldn't have to do this but let's talk about that act of contacting social security and keeping them in the loop they hold you to a very high standard an unfair standard you have to report but sometimes that's not even enough i've had clients and i bet todra when she was at legal aid of north carolina we will have a client that comes in and says i told them i was working it was a couple hundred bucks here a couple hundred bucks there i gave them my pay stubs they kept paying me what am i supposed to do i'm not going to turn down money i got bills i got you know i got things i got to do social security by and large will still hold that against you so you have to report and then report some more and then probably report a third time during covid which is when this is being filmed obviously if anybody's watching it recorded later this is september of 2021 every social security field office is closed every social security uh office of hearing operations the hearing offices are closed in the sense that we can't walk in there um so the only way to get in touch with folks right now is to call or if you're lucky enough to have a fax number you can fax something in or you can mail something in and everybody at social security if you're on this call or everybody at disability determination services cover your ears real quick someone say something bad about y'all i was convinced prior to coving that when i mailed something in as a lawyer when i mailed something into social security it went into the trash i cannot tell you how many times i know i've mailed things in and it just gets lost and i'm not saying there's malice or anything like that i'm just saying they're busy these folks work hard their workload never goes down can you imagine working and working and working and your work always stays the same or continues to increase that's what folks at social security are doing so if you need to report your earnings here's a couple things i want you to try to do since you can't go by there and drop it off if you're mailing something in i want you to keep a copy of whatever you mail in that's very important if you're mailing a pay stub don't mail your actual paste up to social security you keep the original or you keep a copy but make sure you have to be organized on everything that you're doing with social security you have to tell them hey i've i've sent this in on this date i have another copy here i can send it to you again my preference right now with social security is try to fax documentation in because you at least get some sort of fax confirmation if you can try to do that please please please um i'm already kind of running behind on my little schedule but i gotta we're gonna cover a few topics we're still doing questions i promise but we're gonna cover a few few more important topics now this is for title ii disability recipients right so this is where i'm kind of dividing folks so not everybody this is going to apply to but folks who have paid into the system who've been approved for disability who's getting their 1200 a month or whatever their check is there is something called a trial work period a trial work period allows you to test your ability to go out and work and the way it works and this is confusing and i was i was hesitant to really get into the ins and outs of it but just bear with me you don't have to understand it fully but just bear with me here the trial work period is lasts for about nine months not not about it it lasts for nine months not consecutive you can try to work for one month and then the next month you have no income and then the third month you're back at a different job or the same job the trial work period is a period of time where over the course course of nine months um you can work and you can have income if you make more than not for 2021 it's 940 dollars if you make more than 940 dollars in that month it triggers your trial work period uh social security does not hold that against you for those months so if you go out and let's say i'm getting 1200 a month in social security disability benefits i go out and make a thousand dollars september of 2021 that is a trial work period month for me that's one of my months okay that's one so over the course of five years from your first trial work period month you can work nine months without them holding it against you okay after your nine months expire after your trial work period expires you have 36 months consecutively where you can work and still get social security disability benefits as long as they are not at that sga level that's that thirteen hundred dollars and ten that's a very important number you still can't go over that um there's other rules and i really wish that i could kind of hit them but i will say the one thing i want to point out is if you do your trial work period you do your nine months uh and you get beyond that and you have a month where you do make some good money you make more more than that thirteen hundred and ten dollars you can actually ask they they will cut you off for that month for that month you earn thirteen hundred and ten dollars but if the next month you're back down to zero um you can actually get reinstated you're not you don't have to go reapply your your the months you're working and earning more than the allowable amount you might not get any benefits but you don't have to go reapply you're not kicked off the program so to speak um we're talking about this thirteen hundred and ten dollars and we keep going back to it that's the magic number that social security uses and remember todra martin and i said that was the general rule so here's here's a big catch and this is a very very broad topic that can't be covered in this amount of time but there is a a theory called or a thing called income related work expenses income related work expenses and honestly it sounds kind of what it is so this applies to everybody title 16 ssi title ii disability if you have expenses that are directly related to you going out and working they're directly enabling you to go out and work your part-time job or your whatever any kind of work you can deduct the cost of these work expenses now it's social security's gonna gonna really look at this they're gonna really scrutinize us because what we're doing here is this is allowing us to make more money so we're going to do a math problem here in a second i know y'all are excited about that but hold on to that thought just for a minute a income related work expense it can be medical supplies medical devices i've seen it service animals i've got a lot of folks who need supplies for type 2 diabetes syringes things like that bandages any of these sorts of things can qualify as an income related work expense um transportation out of pocket expenses for transportation modifications to your home modifications to your car uh anything that you have spent out of your pocket can be a income related work expense and what it serves to do is it knocks down your earnings in a sense so if you're up above that thirteen hundred dollars in work but you can show that you have income related work expenses maybe it can get you down below that number um on top of things it's a way of maximizing your ssi or your disability each month you have to stay organized you have to report it you have to have receipts for this stuff if you buy a wheelchair from the flea market for 80 bucks cash you ain't gonna get an income related work expense unfortunately you have to be able to document what you are spending this money on um it's a pretty broad uh well as a lawyer my argument is it's a pretty broad uh way of of kind of saving money and we're gonna do this example real quick so kind of bear with me let's say that miss martin earns uh let's say one thousand five hundred and twenty dollars in earnings social security you don't have to remember these numbers but they will knock off the first twenty dollars of your earnings for no reason at all that's just their policy so we're taking fifteen hundred and twenty dollars in earnings and we're knocking off twenty so totters down to fifteen hundred dollars because you're working social security will also allow you sixty five dollar exclusion it's called a work exclusion so we're slowly working our way down you're fifteen hundred dollars minus sixty five is now fourteen hundred and thirty five dollars okay you're still up above sga you're still working you're still making good money let's take a look and see if maybe miss martin has any income related work expenses i'm gonna give you a few examples um let's say and i'm pulling a lot of this stuff right off social security's website just so you know let's say she has a hundred dollars in union dues let's say her health insurance costs a hundred and fifty dollars each month so a hundred dollars in union dues 150 dollars in health insurance and then she has to pay four hundred dollars in transportation special transportation expenses all right hundred dollars union dudes man 150 health insurance four hundred dollars in special transportation you add that up at six hundred fifty dollars but kind of a trick union dues have nothing to do with income related work expenses you can't deduct that unfortunately you cannot deduct your health premiums what you pay each month you cannot deduct that so the only thing that miss martin is able to deduct of the three is the 400 in transportation services that she pays to get her to and from her job so if you look at what's happened well i think we're at 1435 dollars we're going to take off 400 so now we're down to 1035 [Music] dollars in uh earnings now social security is gonna ding today for that that's not a dollar for dollar based on that amount what they do typically general rule is they take whatever that final amount is after income related work expenses they divide it in half and that's your accountable earnings so i don't have my calculator but if i take 1035 dollars and i divide it in half they're going to basically say all right miss martin we know you are making a little bit over 550 dollars in accountable earnings and that's okay we can live with that we can get social security disability benefits even in my scenario where miss martin was working and making fifteen hundred and twenty dollars a month um if you don't have income related work expenses it can get a little dicey um goes back to my original point always document always save always stay organized you have to be almost ocd when it comes to this you have to be proactive when it comes to social security and working and getting disability um you have to stay on top of everything a couple real specific examples related before we go to the next topic routine drugs are not income related work expenses the drug has to be specific to your disabling condition but my argument is that's a lot that's a lot right if i need to take my metformin to keep my diabetes at a certain level then that's specific to my disabling condition co-pays are an income related work expense so while your monthly premium is not your co-pays are the last catch is we're talking about this on a month to month basis so it may be that you're reporting things to social security every month it may be that your check from social security disability is going up and down every month these are deductible in the month that you pay them not in the month that you incur them um todrama try to squeeze one more thing in and then we'll we'll see kind of where we're at and i'm sorry because i know i'm talking fast uh i want to talk about ssi title 16 part time work self-employment okay and that's gig economy art self-employment stuff versus unearned income and this is going to get a little bit outside of my realm because there's a tax issue that's kind of couched in this but when you're talking about part-time work versus self-employment versus unearned income part-time's easy right you're you're getting paid there's some sort of w-2 um it's kind of easy to to deal with when you're an employee now if you're self-employed that involves you can't just say i'm self-employed self-employed is an actual like tax status you have to be filing what's called a schedule c on your federal tax returns and you can deduct your business expenses and do things on a tax standpoint um that qualifies you to be self-employed when you're self-employed for social security disability everything that we talked about just in just a little while ago where you get the 20 deduction you get the 65 deduction then you get all these income related work expenses and then they kind of look at one half of whatever that number ends up being you get a lot of breaks if you're working as an employee you get a lot of breaks if you're working as a self-employed individual same deductions same income related work expenses everything we've talked about is the same for employees as it is for the self-employed here's the catch if you're not doing that on your tax stuff you can't just say i'm self-employed that money is counted as unearned income okay if todra sells her piece of artwork for 200 and she's doesn't do the things that need to be done on the tax basis she's not self-employed that 200 the month she receives it is counted as unearned income here's the catch with unearned income you do not get income related work expenses so a little one probably at the end of the world but if you have unearned income one month of fifteen hundred dollars you don't get to start saying oh well i got to do this i got to do this i got a transportation medications my wheelchair none of that matters if it's unearned income so you have to make sure i'm not a tax professional but you have to make sure that you are staying organized and that you are legitimately self-employed awards if you're painting toddler makes the most beautiful painting makes men weep when they see this painting and she gets a roll an award that award is countable as unearned income the month that she receives it okay so keep that in mind unearned income will cause a bigger reduction to your benefits let me say that again unearned income will cause a bigger reduction to your monthly benefits um the last two miss martin i'm gonna kind of lump together there is two programs that i wanted to talk about but i don't think we really have the time to cover them but i just want to say their names one of them is called pass p-a-s-s it is available to everyone getting disability and ssi benefits this is particularly for folks getting ssi benefits pass is a written plan that you do with social security you do you actually reach out to social security say hey i want to go back to work i want to go do this this is my goal this is my job this is what i want to do they will work with you they will set up a program they will approve your past program p-a-s-s and what happens and what that means is any money you spend on education training transportation child care any money you spend towards achieving your goal of going back to work is not counted okay and that it's a very small number it's not going to apply to a ton of people but when it does apply and when you do it correctly and you're proactive and reaching out to social security and say i want to participate in the past program i mean it can it can change folks lives because you can get these benefits you can still spend money on your like i said your education your training child care all those sorts of things and not have to worry about getting kicked off of your benefits social security employees past specialists those are folks that all they do is help folks design a pass um the last thing similar to the past program is called the ticket to work program it is another social security program it is another program where you have to affirmatively or proactively reach out and and touch base with social security to set up your ticket to work then you coordinate with state or local employment networks or vocational rehabilitation you get training you get education they help find and sometimes even maintain employment uh career counseling job placement job support job services and the big catch here is if you are participating in a ticket to work program you cannot and will not be reviewed your disability eligibility will not be reviewed during that period of time and that's one of the last points i want to point out after your proof for disability everybody gets reviewed you know that's just how it is it used to be probably every two three years um it's ebbed and flowed a little bit but on average somewhere around every two or three years whether you're working or not social security will reach out to you and say hey we're reviewing your disability uh give us this information and if you do that you don't need a lawyer you don't need me if you if you respond and say here's my doctors no i'm not back at work no nothing's better i'm not having improved miraculously um they're going to continue your benefits but what happens is so many folks get that piece of paper and ignore it that the letter comes to them and they say hey we're reviewing you and todd martin balls it up and throws it in the trash if you don't respond you're getting kicked off you're getting kicked off and then you're gonna have to come and find me to to try to fix it and reacting to social security decisions is not as easy as being proactive if you keep them in the loop if you document document document if you reach out to them if you tell them what you're doing they'll work with you okay it's not going to be easy and there'll be times where you're frustrated you're going to say why am i doing this but i promise you if you have to react to them singing hey we're cutting you off that's a nightmare um if that happens you do have options if you were ever kicked off the program for working or for earnings um if you ever issued an overpayment sometimes what happens is social security will say hey why didn't you tell us you've been working the past two years and you'll say what do you mean i've been faxing my pay stub in you into your office every month for the past two years social security will say well no we don't think so so you've been overpaid give us back every penny that we've given you for the past two years oh and by the way we're gonna go ahead and cut you off as well that's what you're facing [Music] if you don't stay on top of things i'm not trying to scare you the theme of this is you can work and have some income and still get disability benefits but you have to do it the right way it shouldn't be this difficult but it is and they hold you to a standard and if you're on top of it it will be okay but if you just think you can work i'll give you one last example i know for a fact i got clients right now my office is right through that door that they're working they're working under the table they're working here they're working there and let me give you a couple hypotheticals they're not telling social security about this let me give you two hypotheticals i call social security and i say todd or martin is getting disability benefits she lives down the street from me and i see her out there every week mowing her yard and then she gets out her fancy backpack leaf blower and she just blows all those leaves and then she goes and she works in her tomato garden and she does this every week and it takes her eight hours i don't think she's disabled there's no way she should do that and still get a disability social security will politely hang up on that person they don't they get calls like that all the time usually it's from family members neighbors cousins i had a grandmother that did it to her grandson they don't care about that because they know that that's not worth their time nor is it probably even factual you can't look at somebody and tell if they're disabled right i mean that's ridiculous same set of facts different scenario if i call still me still todra still doing the yard work but i say i've been paying todra four hundred dollars a month to come to do my yard and make it look as pretty as her yard that's when their ears perk up they take those calls very serious and uh there's a sand it's been around for a while it's uh when the grass is cut the snakes will show right so what i mean by that is it's always somebody close to you it's always somebody who you have fallen out with it's always a family member it's always somebody who you feel comfortable with even the employer himself right you have a falling out with your employer the employer's mad they're going to call social security and they're going to say todder martin was working here i just want y'all to know that it's petty it's extremely petty it's none of their business but it happens all the time so if you think your part-time job you're under the table job your gig work if you think you don't need to report that i would just caution you you never know you never know all right todder i think that's all i have to say about that i know i only left about 10 minutes for questions but what you want to do i asked we have a few questions so um i'll dive in our first question is wanting to know where can people go to get help to fill out the initial ssi ssdi application does the social security administration provide that assistance to initial applicants all right good one remember we're filming during coven so this is the rule right now you can't go to the office the way you apply for social security disability of any sort is you contact your local office and if you can put into your google machine your computer ssi office locator ssa office locator what is my local social security office it will pop up and you call your local office specific if you're in winston you call the one in winston if you're in greensboro you call the one in greensboro if you get out into the counties don't assume that it's your closest one folks who live in high point unfortunately a third of them go to greensboro so that's who they would have to call a third of them come to winston that's who they would have to call and then a third of them go to salisbury so in if you go into the computer into your ssa office locator it says what's your zip code and you can put in 27103 and it will say this is your office here's the phone number you call that number and the way they're doing it right now is when you call they will schedule a telephone application for you they won't do it right then so if you call this morning they're not going to take your application on that call what they'll do is they'll say all right we've got you we're going to call you back on friday 10 o'clock the interview itself is pretty simple and and these folks are being very patient with with all the claimants right now so you will do it over the phone please do not try to do it on the computer please please please because something's going to get messed up when you're doing it over the phone you at least have a social security specialist who can hold your hand and take your information and what i tell folks at that point if you want you can reach out to a lawyer or you can wait and see all right you can wait and see because you might get an approval you might get approved for your disability and if you do maybe you don't need a lawyer um it's all what you want to do so if you want to reach out to me or or somebody on a billboard or some handsome person in a commercial you can do that um but you got to get the application started over the telephone also um we can't just so people know if you have specific questions concerning any matter shared in this presentation or need legal advice we encourage you to consult with an attorney with that being said i'm going to try to we get a couple of questions kind of centering on the same thing someone tried to do it in a general way is that we have some parents who children who happen to be adults are receiving ssi and they want to know about the deductions the handling requirements because they've received some type of some different information from social security themselves from different parents in the same situation so uh they just wanted to know where is the best resource to get information about how these things may affect their children's or adult children social security benefits i'm with you and i'm i'm probably not going to get to the crux of the matter but the couple issues i mean first and foremost you can go to the social security website and find general rules the one that i really like um they do it every year they call it they call it like ssi updates or something like that but if you have a living arrangement and you have somebody who is paying their fair share of the rent benefits should not be reduced at all okay so my example earlier in this presentation was if i'm sleeping on my sister's couch and i'm not right i'm not paying rent they're going to ding me one third that's just how it is so my 800 something dollar check is going to be 500 something dollars if i'm paying my fair share then i'm good i still get my fair share so what i've seen in in these agreements these kind of living agreements where i will see a a family member a mom a grandma brother sister write something up that says so and so is gonna live with me but he is paying his fair share if our bills are 1200 a month and there's four of us living in this house we'll each kick in 300 that's his fair share now do we know for sure that little johnny is paying his his sister that 300 no but if you have documentation to show that there's an agreement in place a lot of times that's all social security needs you cannot do it backwards you can't write something now that says oh by the way he's been living with me since 2018 and this has been our agreement the whole time that's not how it works if you do something now you can do it moving forward um i know that doesn't get into all of it and i think a couple folks in the chat kind of popped up with some suggestions very helpful suggestions as well yeah i think some people say you can reach out to whippa uh which is the work incentive work incentives i don't know what the pa stands for but i'm sorry but they can reach out to wifa also we have a question a quick question can an individual on title 2 work up to 900 i work up to i guess 940 a month without benefits being reduced um i still want you to report them i mean the the general the answer is maybe right maybe um but i still want you to keep pay stubs or keep a ledger or otherwise communicate with social security about that um yeah but you're not getting to that sga level you're not triggering it what's called the trial work period so if you're really at a very low low level still tell social security about it still talk to them about it but typically the lower the level you know the more likely you are to to not have any benefits be reduced all right and so wipa is work incentive planning and assistance and speaking of which i think one of our last questions wants to know um they have clients who say the judge or a lawyer said that they can make this much which is different from the rules that they follow in wipa is there any situation where an agreement is reached in court contrary to the ssa's work expenses no unfortunately no i mean social security is going to take the position like these are our rules so and i have to follow as a social security lawyer now i realize there are other programs out there and other uh you know considerations but looking at it from just a social security standpoint you can't contract your way around that also um we asked that please complete our short feedback survey um let us know how we did and what else you would like to have us present on um i think there's the link in the chat that is i don't think we have any more questions that i see um so therefore if there are no more questions we are right at 12 on the dot so thank you all for coming um we're so glad that so many of you participated and we're interested in this and again if you have any feedback for us or if you have any other ideas for topics or presentations webinars workshops you would like us to do please please let us know

Channel: Disability Rights North Carolina

Views: 66,896

Keywords:

Id: eFDDuS1eQqA

Length: 57min 11sec (3431 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021