How do people survive while waiting on their disability case?

Spoiler: I don't know.

I have been hesitant to write on this site while my disability case is ongoing. There is so much I would like to say. I figured my case would have been decided by now. I mean, I have been out of work since October, 2021. This is now June, 2024. That is about two and a half years now that I have been out of work. And for the last two years of that time, I have had no money coming in – no help from the government while I have awaited for this horrible process to play out.

And that is the point of this article. How are people supposed to survive while waiting for a decision on their Social Security Disability case? I wish I knew the answer. Let me know (as soon as possible) if you do.

If you are reading this you should already know how the process works. You apply for disability. You, most likely, get denied at the preliminary level. You appeal. Your appeal, most likely, gets denied again. Then you get a hearing before an ALJ (Administrative Law Judge). This is your best chance to get approved. If you don’t get approved and you still wish to pursue your case, you can appeal again to an Appeals Council. If the Appeals Council decides you were right in your grounds for appeal, they will send the case back to the ALJ – incredibly, most likely the same ALJ who denied you in the first place. I think they schedule another hearing for you to state your case again. If the judge again denies you, you have pretty much reached the end of the road. 

Oh, but wait. There is still a small dirt path which you can take. You can take your case to federal court.

It never ends. It would be one thing if the process were, relatively, quick. But it’s not. I could understand knowing your fate in a year, maybe a year and a half. But, here I am, two and a half years now with no end in sight. I am looking at another nine to (gulp) eighteen months before the Appeals Council even decides to approve remanding my case. And there are no guarantees on that. In fact, I think I’ve seen in my research that maybe 10-20% of cases are approved by the Appeals Council. “Approved” doesn’t mean that you win. It just means they agree there are things that they agree the ALJ may have overlooked or not given enough credence or weight to. 

Like, say in my case, my judge stated in her decision that she “did not find persuasive” that all three of my treating professionals viewed my mental state as “precluding all work.” Or my judge ignoring and not mentioning the vocational judge at my hearing answering that there were “no jobs in the American economy” that would hire me if I was unable to work eight hours per day, five days, and forty hours per week on a consistent basis. Or, as in my case, the judge failed to mention my medications and treatments I have been religiously taking to no effect. Or if the judge twists your words around during your hearing to fit into her argument.

So now I am stuck in limbo waiting another year or more to know my fate because I had an unfair judge. Another year of no income and racking up debt. Just using that word “racking” gives me PTSD because that is one of three jobs the vocational expert, initially, said I could do was “racking.” My lawyer warned me that that would be the case – “they always say you could be a racker.” What is a racker? That is someone who puts pastries or doughnuts on racks in displays at bakeries or places like Dunkin’ Donuts.

Well, the vocational expert was right. I could be a racker, but not like he described. Instead I’ve been a racker racking up debt.

One doesn’t realize how much it costs to survive on a monthly basis until one has no income coming in. There are groceries, health insurance, car payments, car insurance, rent, electricity and gas bills, phone and TV bills. I know what you are saying – some of those things aren’t essential to survive, but let’s be realistic. A person needs a car. They need a phone. They need a TV.

In my case, the bare minimum adds up to about $1600 per month. I have been fortunate that a few months ago I qualified for state aided Medicaid which provides me with free healthcare and prescriptions. Thank God! That was an additional $800 per month I was paying for COBRA  for eighteen months in order to extend my healthcare from work. So yeah, for about a year and a half I was going through about $2500 per month. I thought I had a decent amount of money saved up when I lost my job, but, damn, it went fast.

Again, I never thought this process would take this long. And then to get denied! Like a so-called friend told me after, "Looks like you put all your eggs in one basket and got burnt." Nice friend.

How do people survive the waiting? I asked a secretary at my lawyer’s office this and I got a blunt answer – “That is why we have so many homeless people.” Holy shit! Thanks for your honesty. 

What recourse does anyone have? I was fortunate that I had great credit at the time I lost my job. I had three credit cards with zero balances on them. I had just bought a car a few months before my last day of work so I was committed to five years of monthly payments. Who knew I was going to have a mental breakdown? And who knew it was going to be out of work this long? But I was prepared, or so I thought.

Fast forward almost three years and my savings are gone. My three credit cards are pretty much maxxed out. I was prudent (or was I?) that I applied for a fourth credit card with one of those 0% APR on balance transfers and purchases while my credit was still good a few months into my absence from work. But I had maxxed out that card too and now the promotional period is coming to an end this month.

One day while sitting in the park bemoaning my fate, I was racking my brains. There’s that word again – rack. I had tried to open up yet another credit card in the past year, but it was way too late. My utilization percentage on all my credit cards combined was around 78%. I won’t say exactly the dollar amount I owe, but it’s easily in the five digits … and the first digit is not “1”. I needed another one of those cards with one of those promotional 0% balance transfer fees. I had read some scary stories about how much credit cards smack you with retroactive interest fees on balance transfers if you don’t pay it all off by the end of the promotional period. My promotional period on that one card I mentioned earlier was ending on May 11 (not that I received any reminders from the credit card company, of course). I was worrying I was going to get hit with thousands of dollars of interest fees. 

So I came up with the desperate idea of asking my partner, Erin, to open up a credit card with one of those 0% balance transfer promotions. I hated to do it. I’ve never had to ask anybody my whole life for anything, let alone money. It has always been something I have taken pride in. I worked my ass off in school to get a full scholarship for college. I bought my first, and subsequent cars on my own. I never had to ask daddy for anything – not even $5 to go to the movies.

But here I was asking someone I loved to do me a huge favor. Of course I was going to be making the payments on it somehow, but it was still under her name. It makes me feel horrible.

To make matters worse, Erin and I had been paying my father rent for living on the floor above him in my family home. It wasn't much, but it was something. My father could have gotten double what he is getting from us for it if he had rented to an outsider. But he preferred not to gamble and have some rowdy family living upstairs from him. So it worked out for both of us. Plus, I was close in case he ever needed anything. I also liked the idea of being close to my mother, but that wasn't the case for nearly long enough.

But now I had to ask him if we could skip out on rent for a while. Actually, it was more like I had to tell him. Being the good father that he is, he mumbled something about bad timing (it was property tax time), but he didn't say no.

So that should sustain me a few more months. But this isn't financially healthy and it can’t go on very much longer. I need some closure to this either way. It is one thing to be a financial burden upon myself, but now I am passing my financial burden onto my partner and father. That is unacceptable to me.

The problem is even if I wanted (I need) to get a job right now, I can’t. The judge held it against me in her decision for going out to the coffee shop, getting an iced coffee (via mobile order so I don't have to actually interact with any employees), and sitting at the park in my car listening to sports talk radio for a couple of hours. She criticized me for cooking dinner two or three nights a week, if I felt up to it, for my partner. She criticized me for sometimes playing online chess. She criticized me for writing a journal/blog. What would she say if she knew I was working part-time as a greeter at Walmart? I think we all know what she would say.

So I am stuck in perpetual limbo. Obviously, I can’t hold down a job right now even if I had to. I passed that stage of "having to get a job" a long time ago. Again, I would think a judge would be rational enough to understand that there has to be something wrong with me if I can’t get a job even though I absolutely need money to survive.

But I gave up months ago trying to understand how “impartial” judges think. There is nothing impartial about these judges. They work for the Social Security Administration, plain and simple. They don’t have any empathy for disabled folks. They are not here to feel bad for us. No, they are there to try and discredit claimants in any fashion they can.

The shittier part is approval or denial depends on the luck of the draw. It shouldn’t, but it does. There are websites that show you how often judges and states approve or deny claims. Some judges approve claims at higher rates than others. Some of them approve at rates much higher. I saw judges that approve claims 88% of the time, and I’ve seen other judges approve them only 22% of the time. I think my judge came in at 48% when I asked my lawyer. 

Approval rates also vary by state. I think I remember seeing Hawaii’s approval rate was close to 90%. Come on, now. You are already living in Hawaii and you want to just hand out disability benefits there like it is M&Ms? Other states are lower than 40%.

I think cases should be cut and dry. There should be one universal standard. Maybe they should have a jury of judges ruling instead of just one biased one. Majority rules. Even criminals have their fates decided by a jury of their peers.

I was also talking to my lawyer this week and he told me that if my case was heard before 2017, he guarantees I would have won. Prior to that, medical records stood on their own and could not be disputed. Judges had to take them at their word. But then Donald Trump became President and one of the first things he did was to give ALJs the option to find medical records “not persuasive enough.” So, basically, judges could, like in my case, ignore medical records if they didn’t care to believe them. Poof!

My lawyer also mentioned that Biden is trying to reverse a lot of the damage done by Trump, but that even if he is successful in reversing things, it would not help my case. People would only benefit that come after the new/old rule gets passed. Lucky me. As if I needed any more reason to hate Trump.

So, yeah. The system sucks. Even criminals waiting in jail cells get faster due process than disability claimants. Come to think of it, criminals have more overall rights than disability claimants. The right to due process. The right to trial before a jury.

So now I have to try to come up with ways to get some kind of money to come in. I don't want to rely on other people. I can now see why sometimes people drugs. I would never, but it would be an option.

I made some good money playing online poker for quite a few years back in the day. Then the government closed down all the poker sites to U.S. players in 2011. I researched if there was anyway U.S. players could play nowadays (I mean, sports betting is now legal and advertised everywhere). I found a site or two that you could play on, but you have to jump through some hoops to deposit money. They only accept crypto.

That got me looking into investing in crypto. It is highly volatile and Tom Brady, famously, lost $30 million investing in it a couple of years ago when it crashed. Crypto has rebounded a bit, though. Looking at some of the graphs for some of the crypto currencies over the years made me salivate. I know I would never get lucky enough to invest in a crypto that costs five cents per share today and see it skyrocket it to $1000 a share in a matter of weeks. But, apparently, it happens (or did happen a lot). These are the gambles that the government has me being tempted by.

I mentioned sports betting before. I have even looked into doing that. I've always said I would never bet on sports. I don't like betting on things I have no control of. I will bet on poker because that is me betting on myself. I won't even get into the whole debate about poker being a game of skill as opposed to luck. But sports betting? I've never been tempted to do it despite my being a diligent, informed, and educated sports fan. The more I researched, the more difficult I realized it is to win. Vegas and bookies are too smart with their odds. I, originally, thought parlays was easy money. A parlay is a way of winning much more money on a bet by betting on multiple things all happening. You can bet on two, three, four, ten, twenty, fifty things all at once, but they all have to happen for you to win. If you bet something as little as $1 on twenty different things all to happen, you could win hundreds or even thousands of dollars. But if just one of those things doesn't happen, you lose. It is a lot harder than it sounds (or it did sound to me).

But, again, I have been tempted. Desperation is a dangerous thing and it makes people do dangerous things. Maybe I will look into selling stuff on eBay. Maybe I will look into selling my body. At this point, I am running out of answers. All I know is all this stress does nothing to help my depression. My therapist tells me I need to stop thinking about the judge, my finances, my future, but how, realistically, can I be expected to do that?

Again, I am stuck in limbo. I cannot begin to get better until my case gets a positive resolution. Once I have some assurances that I will be okay in the near future, then I can work on trying to claw my way out of this depression. If I have to keep worrying about survival, there are no breathing or visualization exercises that will help brighten my mood.