Question to those living on disability

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I'm on it myself & it seems a pitiful amount to live on and hardly adequate.

How are you getting by ?????

that a person is expected to be able to survive on $339/month baffles me.
& i'm curious as to what advice those who are on it long-term might have to offer on the subject.

thats so little bit too live off from.rent a lone can cause 600 or more.

i think it doubles to about $700/month after the first year, but til then i'm pretty much living in government induced poverty

and even $700/month is hardly anything at all if a person ever plans to get married and/or possibly have children someday .

excelletly it goes fast

Working, $300 a month is not enough to cover rent, not even here in Texas where the cost of living is supposedly lower. Granted, I'm still living at home but that doesn't mean I want to leave the nest and go it on my own.

Also, the motivation I get from letters from the SSI office telling me I owe them $2,000....yeah.

wow $2,000 I won lol i got a letter saying I owe Bank of America $8,995.00
and i still don't know how,

If it's SSI and you're getting free rent, they subtract out their estimate of how much rent you'd be paying if you were. So, if you moved you'd get more SSI. Of course, it's still so little that it's sub-poverty living (not likely to end up in the 'nice' part of town). There's so much hysteria about cheats on the system (and jealousy or something??) that it's mandated sub-poverty living. Reminds me of people being jealous of the blue handicapped parking spots when they're not physically disabled. WTH?

I was listening to an (audio)book last night about Latin America, and how some countries tried some radical economics that involved basically cutting all such programs. Horrible stuff. And there are people in the USA (and UK, and elsewhere) who would do that here (USA) if they could.

I live ok on disability, and I can give you a few tips how it's done.

(1) Housing subsidy programs: There are many, besides Section 8. Talk to a social worker. Many programs will pay a percentage of rent. Try a studio apartment or a roommate situation, like renting a room in a house.

(2) Food: You should be able to get food stamps. There are also churches and organizations that provide free meals and you can eat there sometimes. Also, I have spaghetti, beans and rice, pancakes for three meals (all very cheap) and then eat hamburger, chicken or fish for other meals. I buy all off-brand.

(3) Utility Subsidies: Contact each company. I get a $400 credit every year on my power bill.

(4) Don't plan to drive (this goes without saying!) but get a disabled bus pass and/or a bicycle. I get my bus pass free through DD brokerage services.

(5) Clothing-Thrift stores rock!

(6) Entertainment- Netflix- thousands of free movies and tv programs to your pc, rent two movies at a time unlimited for around $13.

(7) Medical- I live in a state that pays what medicare doesn't for healthcare, so I have zero medical expenses.

that is good advice.

I'm on disability. I was getting SSI but it switched to Social Security Disability about six months ago. I was getting $795 a month from Social Security Disability but I just became eligible for Medicare so starting today I'm only getting $684 a month. The way I'm getting by is by living with my parents. I can not qualify for any kinds of housing programs because I don't have the rite kinds of diagnoses & my state(Louisiana) has been having major budget problems & the social services are the 1st things to get cut. I ran up a lot of medical debt a couple years ago that I'm trying to pay off. I also have my cellphone & the cable/net bill. I have to pay for all my personal stuff as well like clothing, doctors appointments, my food when I eat out ect. I'm really lucky that I'm still able to live with my parents because there are no other options here for me rite now. If it was not for them; I would be living on the street or maybe going to prison or dead

yeah it's pitiful and I do feel bad about it. Suffering from depression and social anxiety it's hard for me to study, function in everyday life and work at the same time. I generate some income from designing websites, programming and selling art but it's unreliable and dosen't pay much. Good thing is that I will receive my cand. med in about 5 years from now and then I will pay society back. I really feel bad for those of you in the us though. 300-800$ per month omg.. I expect my rent to be close to 1000$/month (electricity, cable and internet included) when I move out. Then there's food, books and study material ++. Fortunately I have a cheap life style; I don't go party, and books and internet is my only source of entertainment. From disability money I get roughly 1800$ a month, then I receive 700$ scholar -ship/month. Travel expenses and tuition are founded by the government.

If you don't a job, shouldn't you remedy that situation first?

Last edited by Molecular_Biologist on 08 Jul 2010, 4:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

#1 i can't work if i can't get a job
i've tried, it's why i'm on disability in the first place, otherwise i've prolly have to live illegally in a tent in the local forest.

#2 even in the unlikely event that i get the shittiest of entry-level regular work, if my earnings exceed $677/month, then my disability pay gets pulled and i'm pretty much still left in the same s**thole situation with not really enough money to live on, except that then most of my day would be occupied and i'll have less time for more important things.

Honestly, what with:

- housing
- utilities
- cell phone (let's be honest, it's much harder to survive without one these days)
- living expenses (hygiene, clothing, etc.)
- food
- car payments (I don't have one, but only because i'm prolly going to be too broke to ever afford a single payment at this rate)
- subsequent gas & insurance costs
- medical insurance
- etc,

how are people supposed to survive without significant money? especially since the cost of living is definitely on an upward curve since the world is too economically ret*d to follow good long-term business practices? Everyone and their grandmother's know deep down if they look hard enough, that things have not gotten more expensive so much as everyone wants to get fabulously rich, and the more people who manage it do so, the more it devalues our money. Cruel irony; There's a limited supply of money in the world and you can only spread it so thin. When people like Bill gates just sit on 60 billion dollars, that money is taken out of the equation. it's currently doing no one any good, and it's certainly not doing the economy any favors. Same goes for the multitudes of other rich people on the planet: They're stagnating the flow of money which keeps our economy alive.
when certain levels of financial success become a standard, but reaching that level becomes no easier, and so on and on in a vicious upward spiral to the point where the average joe can no longer afford the cost of living and must rely on a system of borrowing and credit just to make ends meet.

It's sad when there are enough resources in the world to support people, but that cannot get to the people who need them most for lack of such a silly thing as paper money, which only has imaginary value anyways.
the only real wealth is material wealth. Monetary wealth is just a place-holder. It's only good for burning if you can't buy anything with it.

when prices go up worldwide to try to save themselves, they're making more money, but in the long run, they're actually just devaluating the currency itself, until they're right back where they started.

The oil crisis was just one more straw in breaking the camels back. We've been inevitably building up to this collapse for years

the fact is that the economy is far more stable when a vast majority is middle-class.
the second everyone becomes millionaires is the second money devaluates and having a million dollars means nothing special. At that point, everyone's new dreams is to become billionaires. But has it become easier at that point to become a millionaire in the first place when you're starting from ground zero? nope. It's the norm for the established, not the beginners and the market will always cater more towards the already established. so money de-valuates and the newer generations are f****d over with debt from the previous generations ignorance of bad economics and short-sighted marketing schemes. in the last 50 years, advances in technology have always been followed by incredible wealth and incredible new standards of what people should be earning financially to support such a frequently evolving, and obviously price-gauging market niche filled lifestyle. The American Dream is no longer just a family home with all the basic necessities to see you through life. These days the American Dream is warped beyond recognition. It has become an abomination.

there never will be enough jobs for everyone.
we can't fool ourselves into thinking that there are enough, and that some of them are just ones that nobody wants and that's the reason for unemployment; because they're either lazy or refuse to settle for less. That excuse went out the window the second that illegal immigrants seized onto those jobs like an effing life-raft. As long as other people are willing to work for near-poverty level wages, we will never get those back. While those of us just entering the job scene with no experience are crowded out of the equation by hordes of desperate overqualified middle-aged people with impressive resumes and cutthroat interview skills, trying to get whatever scraps of income are left to anybody. It'll be a sad sad day in history indeed when someday you need a 4-year college degree just to get enough of an edge to land a sh***y frycook job at your local burger joint and still be making just enough to survive.

I may be wrong on a couple points.
but to hell with it, i have bacon-chocolate bars and bacon is never wrong

Very excellent post Seanmw. Last year the US government said that the cost of living was actually going down. It was the rezone given as to why the disability payments did not go up this year like they usually do. Disability payments increase every year supposedly at the same percent rate as the cost of living increases. The disability payments could not be reduced thankfully but they said their will no no increase next year as well. I do NOT understand how the cost of living can be going down when the prices of everything keeps going up

What really ticks me off thou is that I WANT to work but I am unable to because of my conditions. One of my conditions mite could be treatable but I had to give up treatment because I could NOT afford it. I think it would make much better sense to have better health-care & job finding services for people that way less people would need to be on disability. I spent about 38 months of my life working because I wanted to better myself but after I factored in the taxes, the cost of transportation to & from work cuz I cant drive & my reduced disability payments while I was working; I was making about the same amount of money every month as if I would of not been working at all. Now that I am on Medicare; I am making about $10 more a month than what I was getting from SSI before I started working & I also ran up a lot of debt that I'm still paying off on because I wanted to work. I feel like I got completely screwed by trying to better myself. The system entourages people to say on it instead of helping em find jobs. It's no wonder that people cry about abuse

490€/month here and my rent is 450! but its because i should get another 250€ if social ret*ds wouldn't be so f*****g dump

Probably the main reason why the government's lacking money:

idealistic programs it doesn't need, but stubbornly clings to

think about it. NASA for example. How many billions of dollars go into projects and blown up shuttles that serve no practical purpose here on earth? Advances in science and aeronautics are cool, but we don't necessarily need them to survive our economic crisis right now in the present Studying life on Mars doesn't have to be done all right now, we have til the end of time to do that, stop blowing billions of dollars of our money to send fancy cameras into orbit in the middle of worldwide economic crisis when we're not even going to see practical real-life applications of this research for decades, maybe centuries yet, it ever at all. We don't need to study that black hole right now, if it sucks us in, it sucks us in, we're all dead and that's that. Predicting Astronomically related doom of the earth is just a costly waste of time when you can't stop the inevitable anyways.

Bottom line. Let's balance out and perfect the s**t we already have before we go diving into new technologies and costly intellectual pursuits just for the sake of making our nation look accomplished and superior. They're cool, sure, but all this s**t cost money and our nation has been steadily going to the brink of bankruptcy for too long trying to keep up with and expand on it's fanciful ideals rather than stabilize its finances and deal with and maintain effectively what it already has. For the love of all that's holy, we're Trillions of dollars in national debt (USA). With a capital T.

One factor i believe has led to a decline in economic growth is that there is no longer any real unsettled frontier. People with essentially no money can't just settle a plot of land anymore and build a life on their own sweat and ingenuity anymore. everything is owned by someone now, down to the last speck of sand on the beach. economics have strongly helped shape our laws, and our laws in turn with each passing year become more and more rigid, entrapping us like bugs in amber in a way of life that will inevitably fail someday as surely as every institution has before it since the dawn of time, only to be briefly footnoted in the annals of history and remembered only for our colossal failings, pointed out as a lesson to future history students and warned sternly not to repeat such short-sighted mistakes. without a new frontier on the horizon, we have nowhere else to turn for new resources, settlement, and they will eventually all dwindle. We will turn our eye then inwards. It is a stark reality that unless controlled every so often by vast casualties of war, disease, or such as them, that the world will eventually over populate and surpass the threshold that all the resources on earth cannot at that point possibly any longer sustain. If cosmic, manmade, or natural disasters don't claim us as a whole, then starvation will drive back our numbers to sustainable levels and the ensuing chaos that would come with such worldwide disasters would probably destabilize the foundations of our society enough to send us plummeting back into the dark ages, much like the renaissance and all it's art and invention was lost to the aftermath of ignorance and warring feudal lords. Only to be rediscovered again and reclaimed centuries later

we are to become a plague upon ourselves.
we were our beginning from first man. we are our end in no uncertain terms also, a devourer of worlds.
& as such, we are literally alpha and omega
& at the same time the beast that circles the pit.
We are a contradiction unto ourselves.

I hope i didn't sound too morbid and cryptic just now