Good luck to your brother Gilbert.

It is a sticky situation to be sure.

I believe the Ticket To Work is a needed program. It helps people keep their benefits while they try to figure out IF they are indeed capable of working or not. I always thought the $1000/month was somewhat arbitrary. How can ANYONE know that someone who makes $999 a month is totally disabled and someone who makes $1001 is not ? Obviously it has to tie into total disablity. Many people with disabilities that are not total ARE able to work. It is more difficult for them to do then it would have been if they were not disabled, but the CAN do it. With a total disability, you CAN"T do it. I think the TTW is supposed to give us time to figure out whether we can or can't work. I don't think it was meant to have people work consistently and deliberately keep the income under $1000 just to keep their SSDI.....like if you (not you in particular, but any of us) refused an extra shift or two, not because you weren't physically able to do it, but because you wanted to stay under a certain limit.

I don't think it's a specific number that they say, for instance, "okay...you can make $1001 a month therefore you are not disabled AT ALL." I think it's more of a case of, "if you can make that much, why can't you work more ? It's starting to look like you aren't TOTALLY disabled." Losing benefits doesn't mean you aren't disabled, it means SSA no longer finds you to be TOTALLY disabled.

Where and how they draw that line is beyond me