No, that'll lose you the benefits.
https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/cfr20/404/404-1575.htm
"We will evaluate your work activity based on the value of your services to the business regardless of whether you receive an immediate income for your services."
SSI is deliberately set up to fuck people over. (Not in this particular loophole-closer, but in general. You get $900/month to cover food, housing, etc.; a pittance. A savings account balance (or any other countable assets) over $2,000 will lose your benefits.)
No. If their business brings in $5k/month, that's what the SSA will consider their income. Doesn't matter if it's just accumulating in the business's bank accounts; it's OP's income. They've seen people try this trick; it's why the provision exists.
https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/cfr20/416/416-0420.htm
> We generally use the amount of your countable income in the second month prior to the current month to determine how much your benefit amount will be for the current month.
Earning $5k in a particular month would mean zero benefit in a subsequent month, and keeping that $5k sitting in their account to tide themselves over would put them over the $2k limit on assets, making them ineligible for SSI.
> The Social Security office may approve your request for reinstatement. If your request is approved, your temporary benefits start the month following the month in which you made your request. Temporary benefits can last up to six months.
So: it’s not instant. It’s not immediate. And it risks losing the benefits altogether if they mistake a one-time contract for something he could sustain indefinitely.
However, another thing a co-op could do is allocate work among members who do the same kind of work while respecting limits on how much work each member is capable of doing. I assume the rule's purpose is roughly, "Your benefit is predicated on you being incapable of working enough to support yourself, so if you prove otherwise, we can't give you the benefit." Limiting how much each person works seems compatible with that.
But I'd guess the work would need to be allocated based on members' actual capability, not the monthly dollar limit. If someone's work adds up to just barely under the dollar limit consistently month after month, it strongly suggests they're capable of more. Even more so if lots of co-op members have that pattern.
Such a co-op could serve a legitimate purpose because people who can only do limited part-time work may not have much opportunity. Many employers want someone who is full time. Also, some disabilities may make it where someone can only work sporadically. So the co-op could enable someone who is capable of (say) 10 hours/week to do that instead of 0 hours/week.
I suppose the OP will just have to stick to smaller jobs.
It's a chicken and egg problem because it's guaranteed income. There has to be something where they can do partial work and still be on disability. This example of rising rent means for his area that amount is not enough or he will simply have to move which sucks
I know someone with similar problems in the UK: they are part-time, but working more hours would mean paying more in childcare and lose benefits, ending up with less money than before. It's just stupid.
The efforts US politicians go through to make sure that some of the people who have paid a disproportionately large amount of taxes don't get a fraction of them back when they don't need it have been valiant. Considering that you could simply tax them enough to create a universal benefit, effectively refunding part of their own taxes and redistributing the rest, I'd suggest that starving the poor is a goal rather than a side-effect.
We can't give people free college, what if people who could afford college go?
For example, Florida required drug testing to receive welfare; that program cost more than it saved taxpayers in benefits. https://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/florida-didnt-save-mone...
And yet, we have rich people using fraud to get government funds that they have absolutely no need for while the poor get exploited and starve.
The abuse is going on A N Y W A Y; it's just that people get more indignant when one of the "poors" occasionally get that extra soda out of the machine.
1. Find a lawyer 2. Consider a corporation 3. Find an external entity (friend, family, form a trust) to run business
Run all plans through lawyer and revive their agreement in writing
I don't think you appreciate how tight the budget of a disabled person on SSI is.
So my opinion: if you desperately need some money, freelancing websites are not a good option. It's more about luck and determination. I guess if I would kept applying, with time I'd find more projects, more reputation and so on, but that's not quick money.
Might be my country (KZ). I would expect people from US or EU having better implicit reputation. Also it was around 10 years ago, may be things changed.
It sounds like the OP is also in the US, so they will have that same advantage.
Look into a Special Needs Trust. You may be able to sock the money into the Trust without it becoming income to you, and thus jeopardizing your benefits. It’s usually used to keep assets low enough for benefits, but maybe there’s an income reducing benefit as well. Your state likely has multiple providers —- fees, if any, are typically quite reasonable
SSDI allows income from sources other than work, unlike SSI, which bars pretty much all income. SSDI allows you to get things like Financial Aid for school without impacting your SSDI. You can even trade stocks and gain money from stock sales and not have it impact your SSDI. Your spouse can have income and it won't impact SSDI. Most forms of income that are not strictly "work" are allowed by SSDI. SSI is the more strict of the two programs (and is more generally aimed at people who have been lifetime disabled and never worked or paid into social security).
Open source development + accepting donations seems like a sweet spot for the disabled on SSDI. You're not accepting pay for the "work" you do, thus the donation income is legally acceptable.
OP doesn't specify whether they are on SSI or SSDI, but if they had worked for years before they were disabled, its likely they were able to get SSDI.
Conversely I've known many people who come from lower class or middle class families that have hit hard times who are seriously mental ill (e.g. addicted to cigarettes but so thought disordered that it takes three hours to smoke a cig after waking up.) It strikes me as unfair that somebody who is "lawyered up" can find loopholes to protect their income whereas for many disabled people the process of applying for disability is like going to the moon or becoming a Navy Seal.
How would you suggest it be ordered differently? I don’t know how we reliably help everyone who needs help if they’re unable or unwilling to seek help. “Moar social workers” isn’t a thing - even with funding, the people don’t exist to scale to the size of the need.
UBI etc seem like basic solutions but doesn’t really help them get help, just helps them not need help to some baseline.
It's an poverty/low income trap. If you're on disability/welfare you should still be incentived and rewarded for making money outside of your government payment.
It could be a constant thing like UBI or a gradual reduction like income tax brackets where more money earned is always more money in your pocket.
This has been an inherent flaw in our legal system since the inception of our country. We do not have a right to equal representation. The right to have representation at all is barely even a thing. There has even been some mumbling about ending the right to an attorney...
I'm not sure that's the case here. It's a matter of knowledge transfer.
Lawyers know things. People with money can afford to get knowledge from lawyers. People without money cannot afford to get knowledge from lawyers.
It's not a problem with the "system" that mathematicians know more about math than the general public, and that people who have the money can hire a mathematician to do math for them.
It's a knowledge transfer problem. How do you solve that? You can't give every person a massive book of every law when they're born. It's impractical to store, and they'd be outdated the next day. All of the laws are online for anyone to read, but who has the time?
A step towards equal representation would start by heavily subsidizing law school making them accessible to everyone. Also, we would need to fund the creation of more law schools. In addition we should fund public defenders an order of magnitude more than we currently do.
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-law-school#:~:text....
Cornell's Legal Information Institute, for instance,
hasn't had the easiest time getting funding although it is produced on a shoestring and clearly delivers a huge amount of value for what goes into it.
State legislators and vendors have long tried to make people pay for access to the law, it seems in the long term courts have come to realize that there is no excuse, access to the law is not for high paid lawyers, but can and should be free because it is not expensive to provide in the electronic age and since you have to follow the law they don't need to give you the excuse that you can't afford to read it.
One of the historical high watermarks in legal history is the existence of the twelve tables, a highly condensed, shortened version of roman law which was prominently displayed in public market places and other easily accessible fora - specifically to allow non-patricians to understand and have access to the law.
Other moments in legal history have ruling classes enacting legislation in languages which the common-folk don't even speak.
We exist along a spectrum between 'everyone knows and understands' to 'nearly no one knows and understands', but don't take the difficulty of fixing the issue with the idea that it isn't a problem in the first place. It is a problem, and it's a large one.
I just don't see how a person without family resources (i.e. most mentally ill patients) could ever qualify and I'm sure that's by design.
https://www.ablenrc.org/what-is-able/what-are-able-acounts/
As of right now it's only for people who acquired their disability before 26. I was born with cerebral palsy so that's how I qualified.
Of course I got passed over for a lot of jobs in favor of cheaper folks. But the jobs I did get were from clients who actually respected me. Also, more than once, a client who initially passed over me for someone cheaper came back a few months later and asked me to do the job after all.
So, perhaps something like that could work for you.
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Regarding the $1,200 per month limit, I'm not sure what the rules are, but perhaps you could set up a corporation that takes on the freelancing jobs and then pays you a salary of $1,200 a month? That way you wouldn't have to turn down a job for paying too much.
Maybe have the corp owned by a trust rather than you personally?
I wouldn't want you to get in trouble and lose the disability, though, so talk to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about before doing any of this stuff.