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I haven't been able to get into my account for over a year now. All because I did EXACTLY what I was told to do by a SS employee, resulting in being locked out of my account. Apparently permanently.
I've been using the system since this thread was started in 2013 and really, it was fine then, but has become a freakin' nightmare of insufficient information, poor design, and I believe a deliberate attempt to obfuscate information that could lead to someone being dropped off the roles of SSDI.
For example, try to find the information on part time work and how it affects your disability payment. Every single link I find on a .gov website leads to a link to "Ticket to Work", which is a program to get you PERMANENTLY REMOVED from SSD. That is the whole point of the program - they are hoping you will make at least 1180 a month for long enough that they can boot you out. That's less than $15,000 a year. Yup, your government considers $14,160 a year to constitute significant gainful employment.
5 years ago, it was easy to find the exact information I now need access to. Now, it is hidden at best, or perhaps not on the website at all.
The question being, have all OTHER routes toward part-time work been rescinded? I would guess the answer to that is "no", and they are just doing their level best to NOT provide the information people actually need and instead providing easy access ONLY to "solutions" that would ultimately lead to losing your benefits.
I am not able to work 40 hour weeks nor can I hope for anything more than minimum wage even if I were to try. I have memory and concentration problems that preclude even learning how to work a cash register (I was a software engineer and even retrained to be a psychologist, both of which are REALLY hard to do when you can't remember the name of that subroutine you just wrote or you don't recognize your clients or remember their names)
However I have a friend who is a therapist and has just gone through 3 office workers in the past few years, none of whom did their job all that well and at least one of whom was padding their hours (as near as they can figure, she billed them double the hours she actually worked, and only did about 25% of what she SHOULD have been doing in the time she actually DID work). He is aware of my many cognitive difficulties and is willing to work around them. And the 8 to 10 hours a week max he needs is just about all I can manage anyway.
But my son is TERRIFIED that I will lose my SSDI. It took me almost 10 years to get it and by the time I made my final application, I was THREE DAYS away from only being eligible for SSI, it had been so long since I'd been able to hold a steady job.
I'm pretty sure that the deal is I could make up to $1180 a month and not lose my SSD eligibility. I doubt I'll make even a third of that. But EVERYTHING we can find on the SSA.gov website talks specifically about "ticket to work" and a couple of similar programs, and not part time work that is most likely only temporary anyway until my friend either sells his practice or hires a competent full time person. It all makes it seem like the only way to work on SSD is via one of their getting-you-off-disability type programs. Which is all well and good, but I am nearly 60 years old and I am NOT going to ever get "enough" better for that kind of thing.
I also can't find out what happens when I hit "early retirement" age. I'm pretty sure that they will switch me off SSDI and on to "regular" retirement at early retirement age for my cohort (which I THINK is 62ish, but I can't find the info on the website any more). But I don't know. I don't know if they've changed that behind our backs, or if its been modified in any way, or anything else, because so much information is obfuscated or they demand that you contact them to find out what you need to know (no way would I call them at this point, not wanting to get any kind of mark on my file that would make them pay more attention to me).
Yeah. So, in 2013, I found the website to be pretty well organized, I could easily find most of the information I needed, and I never had a problem logging in.
In 2018, however, saying the website looks like it was designed by chimpanzees is actually an UNDERstatement. As well as being insulting to chimpanzees.
I have had the same thing happen, gotten the same message. I wait 24 hours and try again.
Can you read that?
Yes, and therefore it's clear that the above is not what you said before.
See Post #8. She said she didn't mistype the password. You said she mistyped her password. She explained that she didn't mistype her password in Post #38. You replied that you just had to wait 24 hours and then "reset" it.
She didn't have to reset her password when she got in the next time.
For example, try to find the information on part time work and how it affects your disability payment. Every single link I find on a .gov website leads to a link to "Ticket to Work", which is a program to get you PERMANENTLY REMOVED from SSD. That is the whole point of the program - they are hoping you will make at least 1180 a month for long enough that they can boot you out. That's less than $15,000 a year. Yup, your government considers $14,160 a year to constitute significant gainful employment.
Well the problem is that the 1180 is tied to the "Substantial Gainful Activity" standard that they use to find if you are disabled in the first place. If you let people earn more than that you would open up pandora's box. I would also think (and I'm not a lawyer) you could make an 'equal protection' legal argument.
What would make more sense is a gradation of 'disabled' maybe like what the VA uses (I know they use percentages). But then you would be creating a 'welfare' program instead of a 'disability' program. Then there is the context of a disability etc, none of which is taken into account. I mean I understand all complex hierarchical systems need standards, there just isn't any flexibility.
And yeah 'trick you to work' is a joke. Outside of the system in IN (or it might have been IL) they are nonprofit 'for profit' ventures. The org gets paid regardless of what job they place you in. They also don't provide anything you couldn't find online yourself.
That's messed up that you can be PERMANENTLY locked out of your own SS account.
It's probably not PERMANENTLY permanent. But its at least permanent until I can go to a SS office and sit there for 4 or 5 hours until they give me another temporary password. And then I have to remember to use it before it "expires", which I think is like 3 days.
Since non-persistence of memory is one of the major factors leading to my disability, chances are better than even I'll forget it. Again. Because I already did this once and had totally forgotten (if I realized it at all) that there was a time limit to get back in to my account, and had forgotten I even needed to take any more steps after having gone to the actual SS office.
Well the problem is that the 1180 is tied to the "Substantial Gainful Activity" standard that they use to find if you are disabled in the first place. If you let people earn more than that you would open up pandora's box. I would also think (and I'm not a lawyer) you could make an 'equal protection' legal argument.
What would make more sense is a gradation of 'disabled' maybe like what the VA uses (I know they use percentages). But then you would be creating a 'welfare' program instead of a 'disability' program. Then there is the context of a disability etc, none of which is taken into account. I mean I understand all complex hierarchical systems need standards, there just isn't any flexibility.
And yeah 'trick you to work' is a joke. Outside of the system in IN (or it might have been IL) they are nonprofit 'for profit' ventures. The org gets paid regardless of what job they place you in. They also don't provide anything you couldn't find online yourself.
Well here's the thing. They reduce my SSDI benefits by 50% of the amount over $85 (and where they picked up on that amount I'll never know, plus as far as I can tell that amount hasn't been increased in years) that I earn in a month.
So sooner or later, you just run yourself out of SSDI money. Which is fine. If you're making more money than you would get on SSDI, it can't be all bad (assuming you are able to do that until retirement, if you do it for 2 or 3 years until you just drive yourself back into the ground, well, that's another problem).
But if you're making LESS than your SSDI payment, it seems pretty harsh to cut you off. Surely it would be better to supplement someone's income than scare them away from even trying, resulting in paying out the full benefit instead of a much smaller supplement.
But then we know all of us folks on SSDI are great big welfare cheaters who ride mountain bikes all day long when we're not too busy stealing government cheese. Right now I have dental work that I desperately need seen to, and an extra couple of hundred dollars a month (after you subtract the amount by which they will reduce my benefits) doesn't help much with that, but at least its better than nothing.
The best illustration I have for these rules is an old novel called "The Cuckoo's Egg," which is a true story of international espionage that happened in the 1970's.
It was in the mid-80s.
I actually got a compliment from Cliff Stoll long ago on something I wrote. I'd almost forgotten about that until you mentioned "The Cuckoo's Egg."
I run into this sort of thing with the VA website and telephone scheduling systems. They are very difficult to maneuver and are finicky. It seems to me they are designed by some young IT gurus raised on gaming and not toward a target audience of 70, 80, and 90 year olds. and they they upgrade and improve the system once my little ole mind has figured out how to use the website or scheduler.
I realize it is intuitive to the IT developer, but I look at my fellow VA elderly shuffling around and needing help and I can understand why the elderly vets just give up and go to the clinic waiting all day to be fit it or (the other extreme) wait for scheduler and get so bad that they may die.
Am being serious, to someone raised on pencil and paper being expected to use these modern government resource saving portals and web sites is just sad.
What's even sadder is an elderly vet screwed out of their life's savings by new-fangled crimes they don't understand like electronic fraud and identity theft. The IT devs aren't trying to confuse grandpa but protect him from other IT-savvy crooks.
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