Frustrating visit at SSA office-round 2
 

I had to go into my local SSA office to drop off my documentation about how much money my kids have received, how much we spent on them, and how much we saved.

I added a few pages of addendums to explain how the money was spent because it was a large(r) amount of money and I was concerned they would think it odd that none of it was saved.

I did a quick accounting of a few of their expenses for that year and explained that a large amount of the money went to repaying a loan that I took from my parents for my kids' expenses in past years. Each of my boys SHOULD have been receiving $472 per month from SSDI, but they only got $66 a month......for 7 years. The end of the accounting year in question, SSDI finally started paying the correct amount and sent a large back pay check for each child. I used it to repay my parents who had loaned me the difference.

The lady at SSA made a face at my addendum forms and had a LOT to say about that being "not necessary", "not really allowed", she doesn't know "how to file this", "no one does this", "we don't want to know all this", and "you should just take this back, it shouldn't be attached."

Then she looked at my form, at the amount received (which included the large 7 year back pay amount), sees that none is saved, looks APPALLED, and says "How could you POSSIBLY have spent all of that and saved NOTHING ?"

Well.....that explanation is on the addendums you just told me NOT to attach !

Ugh !

A half an hour of banging my head against the wall would have been less painful than this visit !

WHERE do they get these people???? Read this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1597729.html

I did division -- using 18 years, not 17 -- and the average cost per year to raise a child was almost $14,000!!!!

$472 x 12 equals a little less than $6,000 per year.................so, seems like the SSA lady should have been asking you HOW you managed so WELL!!!

lol Jana !

A few comments from that article really hit home and apply to us........

"Families living in the urban Northeast tend to have the highest child-rearing expenses"
"housing is the single largest expense, averaging about $70,500, or 30 percent of the total cost"



I was just REALLY frustrated that the form didn't account for, and the SSA worker didn't 'get' that because the total amount paid during that time period included a large backpay amount, it was paid during one year, but wasn't meant to be spent on their care JUST for that year. They had expenses for several years prior that I owed for.

If she had just listened to me from the start, it would have gone so much smoother. She was very dismissive and kept cutting me off. More interested in her agenda than finding out what my questions/issues were and trying to help with that. I hope that she was just having a bad day......otherwise I feel really bad for the really compromised disabled folks who use that office to try to get help.

I was having a decent pain day before I got there. The stress of what happened obviously still bothered me after the fact, hence my 'venting' post. It just shouldn't be that complicated. I shudder to think how things would have gone if I was having a bad pain day and couldn't coherently get my point accross and concentrate on getting answers.

Oh well.....it's over and done with now !

Life is tough enough without people like you had to deal with. They have a job with an income and a body that will allow them to work. Any of us would trade her places and would treat her with the respect you should have received. She needs to walk in any of our shoes and she would understand.

social security offices are notorious for being cheapskates, i got my ssi payments lowered by a considerable amount after meeting with my case worker which is making me crazy, how do they expect me to live on so little? honestly i got bills to pay and food to buy i need all the money that i can get

What you may see as a personal attack is really SSA employees doing what they are paid to do, apply the law and regulations set by Congress. If employees had the authority to override policy, then payment decisions could be made on your appearance or your personality or whether or not the employee was having a bad day or a good day. None of us would agree that is a good idea. The same decision should be made by a different employee with the same set of facts and numbers. That is not personal.

It helps if you try to fit your life into the SSI regulations rather than trying to make SSI fit your life and realize that the bottom line point of SSI is to keep you from starving and living on the street. Your bills and debt are immaterial to the payment. Being an SSI recipient means that you will be and remain a low income disabled person. But that is better than starving and homelessness.

If your SSI payments went down, it either means you have an additional source of income or are getting some food and shelter from someone and that you are not paying the full value of it.