I understand that the program is working against you being able to pay off what you wanted too, but try to understand that the program was planned this way to help you to be able to collect the maximum benifits that you can. For many people, getting a big one time payment (say, roughly the $20 k you would be owed after the $6 k lawyer payment and almost $10k state repayment), if they didn't pay out $18,000 in one month, they would't be eligible for their SSI payment for the next month as they would have too much in assets.