Your DLI is tied to the Alleged Onset Date. This means that if the ALJ denies you, or the Appeal's Council does, you can continue to pursue a claim and be insured based upon the Alleged Onset Date all the way through to Federal Court. It's especially important to file appeals in a timely fashion after your DLI expires--as in walk them through and get a date stamped receipt as a paper trail.

Sometimes at an ALJ hearing the judge (or your attorney) will offer to award you benefits in exchange for you modifying your Alleged Onset Date, which results in less backpay but guarantees you monthly benefits going forward--if that happens and you choose to accept, just make sure you keep that DLI in mind, as well as verify if your monthly benefit would be effected. BTW, if you have much stronger evidence documenting your case at a later date than your original AOD, you might want to consider voluntarily amending the AOD at or even prior to the ALJ hearing.

The most important thing is to make sure you have SOLID medical evidence prior to your DLI. so you have that option to amend your AOD. Make sure you have gone through Functional Capacity Testing and have your doc/s fill out Residual Functional Capacity forms for you, etc. Also, if you don't have an attorney or non-attorney representative, you might want to consider hiring one.

If you are facing serious financial obstacles like eviction or foreclosure you can request an earlier hearing date, by going through your local Senator or Congress person's office.

And finally, depending on your resources, you might be able to qualify for SSI even if you need to reapply in the future once your DLI is past. When you factor some states SSI supplement and Medicaid supplements there isn't always a huge difference between benefits for some anyway--but that's just a worst case scenario to keep in mind.