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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

#151

Post by onei »

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.

On the one hand yes. But letting your system be abused by those that have no need for it is never a good use of funds.

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

#152

Post by sixhobbits »

a few people mentioned technical writing so I will also just plug my repo quickly which has my favourite resources to learn more about tech writing and also a list of companies that pay for it (often per article so very flexible).

https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing

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

#153

Post by OgAstorga »

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…

knowledge is power

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

#154

Post by PaulHoule »

reaperducer wrote: post #130
foxyv wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 math…

People have struggled with "online for anyone to read" for the law.

Cornell's Legal Information Institute, for instance,

https://www.law.cornell.edu/

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.

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

#155

Post by foxyv »

ROTMetro wrote: post #150
foxyv wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge problem with the system is that the laws are not understandable without significant study. Law school is ridiculously expensive. The average cost of a law degree right now is about $200,000. This makes legal representation insanely expensive. 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…

As someone who became a 'jailhouse lawyer' I disagree. Once you understand the basics it's pretty understandable, and it's self documenting with our use of case law. Now, the fact that to read the cases, which are the texts of 'the law' since we use case law and you have to pay a fortune to Lexus Nexus should be illegal. If the text of the cases ARE the law of the land (which the whole case law thing demonstrates is…

However, if say you wanted to offer your help to someone else, you would in fact be breaking the law. You cannot represent other people or offer legal advice without first spending 200 grand on a degree. I agree that the US should offer an equivalent alternative to Lexus Nexus. The law should never be behind a paywall.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #149
Madmallard wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what your relative is going through because mine seems cyclical as well.

Started a few years ago as a neuroimmune disorder with periodic and horrific OCD, depression, muscular failures, inability to concentrate, ... Much of that has passed, but it has morphed into ME/CFS. That still still seems triggered and/or related to an underlying neuroimmune issue. When the immune system kicks up, an autoimmune condition also ramps up and causes inflammation in the brain (among other things), which…

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by ROTMetro »

foxyv wrote: post #155
ROTMetro wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who became a 'jailhouse lawyer' I disagree. Once you understand the basics it's pretty understandable, and it's self documenting with our use of case law. Now, the fact that to read the cases, which are the texts of 'the law' since we use case law and you have to pay a fortune to Lexus Nexus should be illegal. If the text of the cases ARE the law of the land (which the whole case law thing demonstrates is…

However, if say you wanted to offer your help to someone else, you would in fact be breaking the law. You cannot represent other people or offer legal advice without first spending 200 grand on a degree. I agree that the US should offer an equivalent alternative to Lexus Nexus. The law should never be behind a paywall.

The prisons and terms of my supervised release were required to allow me to continue helping inmates I had been helping previously (making an acception to the condition that I not associate with felons and requiring the prison to allow such correspondence). I wonder if that small crack that gives court recognized and enforced legal protection to me continuing to practice law without a degree could be used to break this gatekeeping?

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

#158

Post by sterlind »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #129

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…

Possible factors: Too many doctor's appointments. Severe fatigue. Progressive illness with increasing disability. Issues typing.

Personally, I have hEDS, nTOS and thoracic myelopathy. I was barely able to type for months. There's dictation software, but the learning curve is substantial, everything becomes slow and error-prone, and you have to spend much of your concentration on dictation itself. That and fatigue kept me from working for six months while I rehabbed and adapted.

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

#159

Post by yamtaddle »

lozenge wrote: post #49
hansvm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That (among other thigns) is what business do though. I haven't directly contributed to the bottom line for $WORK for over a month, but as soon as I finish my current project it'll have a significant positive impact. They paid me a steady salary regardless. So long as OP keeps their average contribution under $1,200/mo won't they be fine?

Tax law is written by the rich for the rich. Benefits laws is written by the rich for the poor.

Sometimes benefits law is also written by the rich for the rich. Vanishingly few non-rich can come anywhere near maxing out tax-advantaged retirement accounts, even if they have the spare cash to do it (too much of the limit has to come from your employer), meanwhile the rich can easily structure their income to max it out (and max out their spouse's, and their kids', et c.). The most-effective use of health savings accounts is also as a stealth tax-advantaged retirement account for the rich (the trick is you put money in, pay any actual medical expenses with ordinary taxed money outside the account, then at retirement the HSA money that would have gone to those bills, but didn't, and has been invested and growing all this time, can come out tax-free as long as you—or your accountant—kept the receipts)

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

#160

Post by kanzure »

ROTMetro wrote: post #150
foxyv wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge problem with the system is that the laws are not understandable without significant study. Law school is ridiculously expensive. The average cost of a law degree right now is about $200,000. This makes legal representation insanely expensive. 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…

As someone who became a 'jailhouse lawyer' I disagree. Once you understand the basics it's pretty understandable, and it's self documenting with our use of case law. Now, the fact that to read the cases, which are the texts of 'the law' since we use case law and you have to pay a fortune to Lexus Nexus should be illegal. If the text of the cases ARE the law of the land (which the whole case law thing demonstrates is…

... do inmates get free access to LexisNexis?
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