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Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

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Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#121

Post by fnordpiglet »

PaulHoule wrote: post #114
thathndude wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyer here, but not legal advice: 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

It bugs me that almost all the people I know that have gotten on disability have come from upper-class families, frequently the parents are part of the "business class" and work with lawyers on a regular basis. 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 t…

There are a lot of aid groups that advise on this stuff. In fact I’d never heard of special needs trust and kagi’ed for it and a lot of the results were aid groups offering help in setting them up and understanding them. It doesn’t require you to lawyer up. But it requires you to seek help. A problem with mental illness is you often are unable to seek help on your own, and if your support network is ignorant of the fact help exists you’re falling through the cracks.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#122

Post by Forge36 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #47
Forge36 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steps I'm seeing: 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

> Run all plans through lawyer I don't think you appreciate how tight the budget of a disabled person on SSI is.

They'll require help (Friends/family/someone). However I'm MUCH more worried about them losing SSI because "someone on the internet said this was OK". Granted I have no idea how much a lawyer costs (and last time I used one it came in <$300).

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#123

Post by wing-_-nuts »

thathndude wrote: post #56
nfriedly wrote: post #27

For what it's worth, I used to do work on freelancing sites ~10 years ago and just tended to ignore the race to the bottom. I initially charged $50/hr, and regularly raised my rates so that I was up over $150/hr by the time I stopped doing it. 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…

Lawyer here, but not legal advice: 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

If they acquired this disability before the age of 26 (soon to be 46?) they're also eligible to create an able account, which would have a much lower cost than a special needs trust.

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#124

Post by a_humean »

Neil44 wrote: post #5

It's easy for me and I don't know your situation to say but try not to be so fixated on the $1200/mo. Seems to be that a solid job with Python skills could make the $1200 look small very quickly.

I think the risk here is that the nature of the disability is that they might suddenly be unable to continue working or keep up a reasonable pace of work. Many conditions are cyclical - meaning that you could be productive for a period of time, and then suddenly disabled again.

It might be very difficult to get back on disability benefits after they go above that limit.

This is a common trap with many disability benefit programmes worldwide - they have these inflexible hard numerical limits on earnings that effectively disincentivise people from getting back into work or becoming independent all in the name of fraud prevention. The systems lacks the flexiblity to recongise that people's health and ability to work ebbs and flows.

The moment they earn more than 1200 USD they might no longer be considered disabled by the state. The baked in assumption is that not that we should be providing an accessible offramp to independence and a fallback to support if it goes wrong, but that any demonstration of independence should be met with treating your future claims as fraud.

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#125

Post by paparush »

svieira wrote: post #102
sandworm101 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retired rich people. Whenever a system it setup to help poor people, a harsh system of cutoffs is needed to prevent retired people from qualifying for the benefit by moving money around on paper. The problem is that we have far too many systems to allow relatively well-off people to "zero" their on-paper income, even their personal assets, during retirement. Entire industries exist to facilitate such trickery (see ev…

Starving the poor to prevent feeding the rich seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

This is America. Don't catch you slippin up.

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#126

Post by adrianmonk »

hansvm wrote: post #61
ceejayoz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? 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 delib…

Could a group of SSI freelancers set up a co-op to handle that month-to-month averaging?

If you mean averaging the money over time, that doesn't seem like it would work since it doesn't affect "the value of your services". I assume it's an abstract value, along the lines of

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.

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#127

Post by mannymanman »

globalise83 wrote: post #45

I would recommend using your Python skills to write scripts that perform analytics tasks using JIRA Cloud REST API data. Every tech company I have worked in needed some kind of custom reports regarding development performance, time reporting, financial reporting, etc.... and there often weren't suitable plugins for just that task, and the reports themselves are highly valuable either for management purposes or compli…

Where would you find clients for this? Also is there a youtube video that shows you how to extract this information from the API data?

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#129

Post by wing-_-nuts »

I'm a software developer with cerebral palsy. I hope you don't take this question the wrong way, but what sort of condition disables you from working as a software developer? I only ask because I worked very hard to get into this career imagining that it would be almost impossible to be disabled enough that I could not write code without some sort of cognitive impairment. Your post suggests I'm missing a risk factor I haven't accounted for?

Re: Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

#130

Post by reaperducer »

foxyv wrote: post #118
PaulHoule wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It bugs me that almost all the people I know that have gotten on disability have come from upper-class families, frequently the parents are part of the "business class" and work with lawyers on a regular basis. 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 t…

> 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. 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 t…

We do not have a right to equal representation.

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?

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