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Employment & Supplement Security Income (SSI)

Speaker: Lucy Axton Miller

>> LUCY AXTON MILLER: Hello. I’m Lucy Miller and I’m with Virginia Commonwealth University’s National Training Center. And this webcast is going to be covering the effect of employment on Supplement Security Income benefits otherwise known as SSI. Now I’m going to warn you before we get into the slides, there is math involved. It is not hard math. You can do this math. If you have a calculator, you may want to get that out. Maybe you have a cell phone that’s got your calculator on that. Get it out. We’re not talking about square roots here. We’re talking about basic adding and subtracting, but there is some math involved in this. Very simple math. So let’s get started.

First, let’s just talk a little about the SSI program because there’s some reminders that will help put the rest of the presentation materials kind of in context for you. Remember that SSI is a benefit that’s provided to individuals with significant disabilities and who have little income and few, if any, resources. Now when the SSI program is checking an individual’s eligibility and the payment amount, they look at earned income like wages you may have from a job. They also look at unearned income and that might be things like, I don’t know, cash that your parents gave you or dividends that you received from some kind of investment or any other kind of money that you received that is not related to you working.

Social Security in the SSI program makes a fairly significant distinction between earned income and unearned income. But here’s the really great news. The SSI program loves earned income. It is treated very, very favorably and you will see that in the next few minutes. Now the SSI program does not love unearned income. Unearned income is treated very unfavorably. It pretty much counts dollar for dollar. If you’re found eligible and you’ve got $200 a month in unearned income, pretty much $200 is going to be taken away from your monthly cash payment. But that’s not the way that earned income is counted. So that’s really good news.

Now don’t forget that for students under the age of 18, the income and the resources of the parents count when Social Security is deciding whether someone is eligible and when they’re determining how much you’re supposed to get every month. And this can create some real complication when students go to work because not only is the Social Security Administration looking at the earnings of the student, but that’s getting rolled into this larger determination of how much of mom and dad’s income is also going to be attributable to that child. It gets complicated.

Now once eligibility for SSI is established, the payment amount depends on exactly how much countable income is attributed to that child. And that is a really important word, countable because in the SSI program -- this is good but it makes it complicated -- lots of stuff is not counted. There are income exclusions, there are income deductions, there are certain types of -- of money that are received that are not counted as income at all. I mean we could literally spend hours going over all of the detail in this area. You don’t need to know all the detail. You just need to know that lots of things don’t count and that there’s a series of very complex rules that are used when Social Security’s trying to figure out how much are we going to pay an individual in the SSI program each month.

Okay, let’s look at some basics about earned income and SSI. First of all, SSI is very literal. They are interested in when did you get the check. Not when did you do the work. It’s when did you get check. So let’s say that you’re helping a student get a job that might be paid every week or every other week, there are going to be a couple of months every year where that individual gets an extra pay check. Okay? That month, you’re going to have a lot of income attributed to that student. Now it’s not going to cause the student to be kicked out of the system. Don’t worry about that. But it may cause the student to have a very small SSI cash payment for that month, maybe even a zero cash payment. But don’t worry. Zero cash payment in the SSI program does not mean necessarily that you’re Medicaid goes away. We’ll talk about that later. But this idea that, "Oh I keep a penny of SSI or I’m going to lose my Medicaid." That’s not true anymore and it hasn’t been true since 1989 which is a really long time ago. Okay? So don’t worry about that.

Now, the SSI program is quite literal. You’re supposed to report your income every single month and Social Security is going to take that income and they’re going to put it in what I call their little Playdough Fun Factory and they’re going to subtract this and deduct that and divide by two and whatever they do and they’re going to determine how much exactly you’re due in SSI for that month. Your SSI cash payment -- and this gets really annoying for families -- it goes up and down and up and down based on exactly how much in countable income an individual has in any given month.

So you’re going to see, especially for people that have jobs that may have variable income service type jobs, lots of hours one month, not very many hours another month, it’s kind of annoying because the check will go up and go down and go up and go down and it will be kind of like a roller coaster ride. But that’s the way that this system works.

Now here’s the really great news. In the SSI program, they count less than half of the earned income. Less than half. So by no means do you have a dollar for dollar reduction in your SSI cash payment when you go to work. You always come out ahead by working because the SSI program doesn’t count -- counts less than half and we’ll show you what all the deductions are. So it’s always really good news. Now the last they know when Social Security adjusts an SSI cash payment, for some reason it takes them about two months to make that adjustment. So there’s always this two month lag time.

So let’s say this month you ended up with three pay checks because you had that extra pay period and you had a lot of income. That means that the check that you receive two months down the road is going to be real small. Now there is one exception to this rule and that is when your earnings are high enough to cause your SSI cash payment to literally go to zero. For whatever reason, Social Security is able to make that change immediately. It must be a lot easier to stop a check than to change a check. I don’t understand it. But that is something to know because families get kind of shocked when that check goes to zero and that happens immediately rather than they think it’s going to happen two months down the road.

All right. So let’s look at -- at the process. Social Security starts with your gross monthly earnings. Now let’s talk about that. What is gross? Gross is before taxes, FICA, Medicare tax, before all those deductions are taken out and that-- that’s kind of bad that they look at gross income. But that is exactly how they do it. And they’re so generous. They subject what they call a general income exclusion of $20. Wow. Go buy yourself a pair of -- a half of pair of pants. How about that? All right. And if the student has unearned income and some do, this deduction is taken off of that instead. The $20 general income exclusion is the only exclusion allowed on unearned income. I told you the SSI program does not like unearned income. That is the only exclusion ever permitted. If the person doesn’t have any unearned income, you get to take it off your earned income.

Step 2, next, they’re going to subtract a $65 earned income exclusion and you only get that if you have earned income. Finally, they take what’s left of the gross wages and they divide it in half and you are now left with what Social Security calls countable earned income. So you can see they’re going to take $20 plus $65. Then they’re going to divide the remainder by two. Whatever you’re left with is how much of your income is actually going to count. They take that number and they subtract it from the base SSI rate for that individual. And in the Federal SSI program because it is federally funded, there is a maximum amount that you can receive in SSI; in this year, 2014, that maximum amount of $721. Okay? So they would subtract it off of that or whatever that person’s base rate is. Not everyone’s base rate is $721 and we’ll show you an example of when that can happen.

So this sounds like complicated and how do I tell parents about this or students? It’s very simple. You can -- I want you to memorize this. Literally this needs to come out of your mouth. When mom says, "Okay, you’re going to get Jimmy a job. What’s going to happen to the check?" You can say, "You know, mom, the first $85 that Jimmy earns in any month, that’s gravy." We don’t even -- if you only earn 50 bucks, you don’t even have to report that per se because there’s no impact on the check. Anything over that $85, Social Security is going to take $1 away from your SSI check for every $2 that you earn. And you can take any student on SSI and any job that you can find and I will prove to you that that person comes out ahead financially by working. Always.

And, you know, in the SSI program, there are very few things that you can say always about and have it be true. This is one of them. There is literally no financial downside to working in the SSI program. SSI loves work. Loves it. So no need to sit at home watching SpongeBob SquarePants. Get a job, get out there, go do something. You’ll end up with more money in your pocket.

So here’s the math, all right. Hopefully everyone hasn’t passed out. It’s not that scary. This is what we call the SSI calculation. And those of us who do benefits counseling for a living, this is a tool that we use every single day with beneficiaries to show them the effect of any particular job goal on the cash payment.

So here’s how Social Security does it. They start with step 1. They’re looking to see, do you have any unearned income. Well the example here does not. So we show zero; zero, zero, zero. Step 2, how much gross earned income? Well, let’s say that you have found a job where your student is going to be earning, remember gross, gross earned income of $885. So that goes in at the top. Now you’re going to see some acronyms here on this piece of paper and I haven’t explained them all yet, so you don’t have to worry about them.

So we’re going to skip down to where it says, the general income exclusion. The GIE. This individual gets to subtract $20 off of that $885 and this person has no unearned income so you get to take it off of the earned income. So that leaves $865 and isn’t it magical the way that the way the next exclusion is exactly $65. Amazing how that worked out. And that is the earned income exclusion. So that is subtracted. What is left is $800. Now the student actually learned $885, but Social Security, by taking those deductions, is only going to count that $800.

Now we’re not done. They’re going to take the $800 and then they’re going to divide it in half. So only $400 at the end of this calculation, that’s all that’s going to count for this student. All right? Now step 3 is where you put all the different kinds of income together. This example, there’s only one form of income and that’s earned income and the countable earned income; it’s not $885, it’s $400.

And the last group of steps is where we figure out, so what is the new SSI check going to be two months later, right? Because it takes two months for the check to change. So $721 is the most common base rate. That’s the maximum you can get in SSI this year, 2014. Not everyone gets that so be careful that you don’t use the same base rate for everyone. But we’re going to assume this person is getting the full base rate. We subtract $400 and that leaves $321 in the adjusted SSI cash payment. A lot of times families will say, "But -- but that’s less, that’s less. We can’t live on less." It’s like, "Well, wait, wait, wait. The SSI check is less, but look, you are now earning $885." Now granted some taxes are going to come out of that, but even if you take taxes out, you are going to have more money in your pocket at the end of the day. You benefited financially from working and that’s because Social Security counts less than half of the earned income.

Now this may sound like pretty good news. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Let’s look at the next one. Student Earned Income Exclusion. Do you remember on that last slide there was a little acronym SEIE and I said don’t worry about that. I haven’t explained it. Well, here’s when we’re going to talk about it. This is arguably one of the most powerful work incentives in the SSI program and this is not new. The -- the Student Earned Income Exclusion has been around as long as I’ve been doing this and that’s a really long time. And it just keeps getting better every year because the amount that you’re allowed to exclude is annually indexed.

So who gets this? Well, you have to be on SSI. This is not an incentive for other disability benefit programs. SSI only. You have to be under age 22 and you have to be regularly attending school. Now with Social Security, the devil’s in the details and they have quite a specific definition of what they mean by regularly attending school. But I guarantee you, if you’re working in the public school system, you’re a special education teacher, your students that you have in class with you every day, they count. That -- that -- that counts. They are regularly attending a secondary school.

These individuals are allowed to exclude -- can you believe this -- $1,750 a month -- a month up to an annual exclusion of $7,060. Now here’s the way I like to explain that. Every January, it’s like you’re given a pot of money and the pot of money this year is $7,060. And when you go to work, if you’re eligible for the Student Earned Income Exclusion, all of the wages that you earn in any given month are excluded up to a maximum of $1,750. And what Social Security is doing is every time you exclude some income, that amount comes out of your pot so your pot keeps getting smaller and smaller every month and you’re excluding it up to the maximum of $7,060. So you don’t really get to use the Student Earned Income Exclusion strategically the way you might want to like you don’t get to decide I only want to exclude this month -- this much this month or this much -- no, no. It’s all of your wages are going to be excluded each month up to the maximum monthly amount, $1,750, and that exclusion is going to come out of your pot that you get for the year until your pot is empty. And the pot is pretty darn big, 7,060 bucks.

If teachers who are listening to this webcast are finding students jobs while they’re full time students making more than that, that’s awesome. But I bet you aren’t, okay? So we’ll see what that means. They’re going to automatically exclude up to $1,760 per month until the full annual exclusion of $7,060 is exhausted or the individual is no longer a student. Also dropping out of school -- if you drop out of school, you no longer attend, disincentive here. Okay? So you need to stay in school in order to be able to use this. And you only get to use it until the month you turn 22. So the month of your birthday you get to use it, but the next month you don’t. Okay?

The SEIE figures are annually adjusted so they do go up every year and that includes the monthly amount that you can exclude as well as that annual pot that you’re given.

Now here’s math again. Get your calculators out. And this shows you an example of an individual who qualifies for the Student Earned Income Exclusion and my guess is everyone that you’re teaching, everyone in your classes is probably qualifying for this. And there’s no lower age limit. If you’ve got a 13 or 14 year old who’s working for pay, they can use this. Now there’s an upper limit, 22. But no lower limit. So if you’re finding people paid jobs, they can exclude the income.

Look at the example here. Step 1 we’re going to skip. This example is someone who does not have unearned income. Now you must be a great job developer because you found this student a job making $2,000 a month. Wow. And look how much you’re allowed to exclude. I made this example this way so that I can show you there is a limit to how much you can exclude in a given month and that is $1,750. So this student may have actually earned $2,000, but one $1,750 of it just gets wiped off the top which is pretty awesome. That leaves you with $250 and then you still get the regular exclusions we talked about earlier. The wonderful $20, the lovely $65, this is all bringing the income down to $165. We’re not done yet. You still get to divide that in half.

So, wow. This kid got a job making $2,000 a month and all that’s going to count is $82.50. That is amazing. Again, just like we showed the earlier example, you add the different kinds of income together. This example, the student just has one type of income. We’re going to subtract that countable income from the SSI base rate for this year, the maximum that you can receive is $721. So this student came out like a bandit. Two thousand dollars in gross wages and $638.50 in SSI. It’s almost unbelievable. And it’s one of the things that if you learn nothing else from this presentation, the power of the Student Earned Income Exclusion, every special education teacher needs to understand this because it is an amazing work incentive. There is not another work incentive like it.

So unfortunately Social Security has never extended the age because it would be very nice if -- if you could claim this while you’re completing school all the way up to maybe age 24, 25, college. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. You get it to use up to the month you turn 22.

Now there’s another work incentive that is common. Not as common for students as it is for people maybe who have graduated and it’s called the Impairment Related Work Expense. And this is pretty awesome, too. This is when Social Security actually recognizes that sometimes a person with a disability incurs expenses when they go to work that a non-disabled person would not incur. Like if you’re blind, you may need to pay a reader to help you with the material at work. You may need to pay someone to drive you to and from your job. Well, those would not be expenses that a non-disabled person would incur. So these are Impairment Related Work Expenses and Social Security says, "Well, it’s only fair if we take these expenses that are directly related to you working and to you being disabled, and we’re going to go ahead and take these off of your countable income when we decide how much to give you in SSI every month."

So what does that do for you? It allows you to earn more, pay the expenses that you need because of your disability and still keep more of the SSI cash payment than you otherwise would have without these -- this deduction because that’s really what it is. It’s a work incentive that deducts some of the wages that you earn.

Well, the next slide shows what the criteria are. It’s really quite simple. It -- it -- if you just remember what IRWE means, what that stands for, you know what the criteria is. It has to be impairment related. So the expense has to be directed related to a medical condition you have. It has to be a work expense. It really can’t be, you know, a special Paratransit taking you to the grocery store. It has to be something that is related to your job, the job that you have.

It also has to be an expense that you incur, yourself, that you’re paying for out of your own pocket. It can’t be something that Medicaid is paying for or your Uncle Louie is paying for. It has to be out of your pocket or if you’re under 18, mom and dad’s pocket. In most cases, it needs to be expense that you paid in a month you’re working. But there are some really exciting exceptions like if you end up having to buy a piece of equipment the month or two before you go to work and it’s a piece of equipment maybe you need because of your job and because of your disability, you can deduct that. And Social Security even allows you to kind of take that big ticket item and prorate that expense over a year which is -- that’s pretty awesome. I’ve seen some very expensive like software, computer equipment, communications equipment, things that the family needed to buy and they were able to deduct that off of the student’s wages once they got a job because they needed the equipment in order to work and that allowed the student to keep much more of the SSI cash payment.

And finally, the cost has to be the usual and customary cost. Social Security doesn’t want beneficiaries getting ripped off and they don’t want to reimburse beneficiaries that cost that are un-- unusual or -- or higher than the -- the local cost would be. That makes sense.

More math. This is what the SSI calculation looks like when you have an IRWE. And that’s what -- when you get used to this language that we all talk, that’s what we call these, Impairment Related Work Expenses is too long so we all say IRWEs. And this is an example of someone with some unearned income. Some -- I’m throwing in some complication at you now. This person has $150 of unearned income. And that could be anything. That could be railroad retirement. That could be black lung benefits. I’m from Kentucky and you see a lot of people getting black lung.

Any kind of income that the person is receiving that is not wages, okay? And lots of beneficiaries get other kinds of income besides SSI. So this person has $150 of unearned income and aren’t they lucky. They get the one $20 deduction. And remember what I told you. That is all you get off of unearned income. So out of that $150, Social Security’s going to count $130. There are no other deductions.

Now on the wages side of things, we’re looking good. We’ve got $800 in wages here. We don’t get to take another general income exclusion because that’s gone. But we still get the earned income exclusion and that’s $65. So now we’re down to $735. This individual has an IRWE, an Impairment Related Work Expense and it could be anything. It could -- a common one, Paratransit, the door to door special transportation service to and from a job. That is a no brainer IRWE. That is clearly an Impairment Related Work Expense and it is expensive. A lot of times it’s what, three bucks a ride maybe or more. So that’s a pretty good sized expense.

Another one you see sometimes is where the student might be paying for job coaching or there might be an attendant with them that they’re paying out of pocket on the job site. Those are common kinds of IRWEs. Definitely impairment related and as long as it’s occurring at the job site or in transportation to and from the job, it counts. So we’re going to subtract that. That leaves us with $615. We’re still not done. We divide it in half. That leaves $307.50. Now this individual earned -- earned $800, but only $307.50 is going to count.

Now look under step 3 because this is where you see the disadvantage of having the unearned income. That’s not going away. We take the $130 that we showed at the top over there. We’re going to add the $307.50 for total countable income of $437.50. And that’s the total amount that Social Security is going to deduct from the base rate and remember the maximum base rate is $720 so that’s what we’ve used as the example here and this individual will have an adjusted SSI cash payment of $283.50.

Now families freak out. Remember, they’re like, "Oh, no, no, it’s going down, it’s going down." It’s like, "Okay, don’t panic. Let’s -- let’s add it all up here." A hundred and fifty dollars in unearned income, $283 of SSI and $800 of wages. Is this individual better off financially by working? You bet. You bet. Absolutely. No reason to sit at home and not work when you can have more money in your pocket. Every SSI recipient comes out ahead by working. And I wanted to show you an example with some unearned income to make sure that you can see even folks like that benefit from working.

So let’s do some examples. Let’s say -- le-- let’s look at someone who’s under age 18. And this is an individual who, by the name of Carrie. She is 17 and she’s in your special education class at a local high school. You’re her primary teacher and she gets an SSI cash payment in the amount of $541. Now, Lucy, that’s a weird amount, right? Yeah. That’s a weird amount and Carrie is getting a less than $721 which is the max because she’s under 18, she lives with her mom and dad, some of mom and dad’s income is being attributed to Carrie through that horrible deeming process. So she’s eligible for SSI, but her check is not the maximum of $721. She has deemed income valued at $200 a month and it’s reducing how much of her income is counted. Okay?

Deemed income is a form of unearned income. We’ll show you that on the sheet. Now you’ve worked very hard. Maybe you have the -- the community based work transition program going all out for Carrie. You found her a nice little part time job stocking some shelves at Walmart and we’ve -- we’ve seen this kind of a job for transition aged youth many times.

The pay is going to be about $400 a month and that’s going to depend on the number of hours, but that’s a good figure maybe for you to use to show mom and dad what’s going to happen. And she and her parents want to know. So what’s going to happen to the SSI and my Medicaid? Well, here’s the math.

Start with the unearned income. Carrie has deeming so there is unearned income here. Deeming is a form of unearned income. Now the way you find out how much it is is by talking to the Social Security Administration. They will actually give you that figure. I’m not sure I want teachers doing that. Better get a WIPA involved. Remember from an earlier broadcast, we talked about the Work Incentives Planning And Assistance folks. They can help you find out the amount of deemed income.

But this individual has $200. We’re going to subtract $20. Remember, that’s the only deduction that you get. That leaves her with $180 in countable unearned income. You got that nice little part time job. It’s $400 a month. But let’s stop. Carrie is eligible for that awesome student earned income exclusion. She’s under age 22. She’s regularly attending school. And she has a pot of money, $7,060, that she can use in 2014 as a deduction. So what is Social Security going to do? They don’t ask you how much do you want to deduct? They’re going to deduct all of the wages in any given month up to that maximum figure of $1,750.

Well, Carrie’s only making $400. They’re going to deduct all of that and what they’re going to do, now the pot of money that Carrie has for 2014 is smaller. It’s $400 less. So you subtract $400 from that $7,060. But they’re going to subtract every penny. So look at the rest of the calculation here. Zero, zero, none of it is going to count. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. So Carrie has countable unearned income still of $180. That’s the deemed income less the $20, all right? Her total countable income -- oh, that’s a math error. I’m sorry there, it’s $180. Excuse me. And the base SSI rate is $720. We’re going to subtract the $180. She is going to have an adjusted SSI check -- adjusted, it’s going to be $541.

Well, what was she getting before? Pretty much that amount, right? So she went to work, none of her wages counted against her at all. None. It’s gravy. All $400 of that. So I used this to show you the power of the Student Earned Income Exclusion for someone like Carrie and my guess is that the bulk of the students you’re working with day to day are like Carrie. They’re working in fairly, you know, part time jobs to start out, they’re receiving SSI, they might have a deemed -- a little bit of deemed income, and mom and dad are just real concerned. What’s going to happen if we go to work? Is that going to cause the loss of the SSI? In this case, for Carrie, it doesn’t cause any impact at all. None. Absolutely none. This is really good news.

So the end result for Carrie. Carrie is now working, she’s earning $400 a month in gross wages. That’s great. Because of the student earned income exclusion, Carrie’s wages are totally disregarded. And remember, this will continue month by month by month until that entire pot of $7,060 runs out. And for the overwhelming majority of students, it never runs out in a year because they never earn that much. Okay?

Now Carrie has both her wages and her SSI check to pay for her expenses and her Medicaid is not affected at all. In every state, as long as you retain a nickel of your SSI cash payment, there is no impact on your -- on your Medicaid at all. Even if you lost the SSI cash payment because of work, the Medicaid in 99.9 percent of the cases will stay intact. And -- and I will cover that before we’re done. So that’s good news for Carrie.

Now let’s look at an example of someone who is over the age of 18. Now let’s say that you have Eric. Eric is 19. He just graduated from high school and he was a special education student. He receives the maximum amount of SSI which is $721. Remember, he’s over 18, he’s paying mom and dad for some rent, helping them with the groceries. Social Security says you’re an adult, we’re not going to count mom and dad’s income. You’re helping to pay for your household expenses so we’re going to let you have the full $721 and that’s good news.

Eric has been offered a job at Lowe’s making $800 a month. He is going to be using the Paratransit service to get to and from his job. That is definitely an Impairment Related Work Expense, right? Now if Eric took the regular city bus, that would not be an IRWE. Lots of people have to take public transportation because they don’t own cars. But not everyone is allowed to take the Paratransit service. That is a service limited to people with significant disabilities. In every community I’ve worked in, you have to apply to be able to use that service and your disability has to cause you to be unable to use the regular public transit system.

All right, so what’s going to happen to Eric’s SSI check? All right. This is an individual who gets to use an IRWE, an Impairment Related Work Expense. Now Eric does not get to use the Student Earned Income Exclusion because he is no longer a student. He graduated. He stopped going to school. Okay? So too bad. Maybe if he’d gone to a votech school or gone onto college, those would all meet the definition and he could continue to use the Student Earned Income Exclusion and the IRWE if he had high enough wages to -- to use all of those deduction. But that’s not Eric’s situation. He decided he was kind of done with school for a little while.

All right. So what happens to him? Well, he doesn’t have any unearned income so that’s -- we don’t have to worry about that. Step 2, we start with that gross wages of $800. You know, you get used to the routine here. The $20 comes off, the $65 comes off, they take what’s left, they divide it into two -- I’m sorry, they -- they subtract the IRWE first which for Eric is $120. That’s a fairly significant deduction. It leaves him with $595, they divide it two. He’s left with $297.50. That’s all the income he has which you can see in the next steps -- step 3 there. They’re going to subtract that $297.50 from his base rate which is $721 and it leaves him with a total adjusted SSI check of $423.50.

So, how did he come out? He came out great. He’s no longer eligible for the Student Earned Income Exclusion. Well, that’s a better exclusion. It’d be -- it’s too bad he didn’t go on to trade school but, you know, I’m not going to say it’s too bad because he did get to use the IRWEs and he does have that transportation expense. He’s going to use that expense regardless. He might as well throw it in there as an IRWE and get some of it reimbursed. Now you need to be careful that you don’t oversell this to parents because if you look at where the IRWE is in the math, it’s taken before you divide by two, not after. So it’s not like all $120 is actually sort of reimbursed to him. It’s about 50 percent.

So, but if Eric is going to spend that anyway, you might as well get half of it back in an SSI check that is not reduced as much as it otherwise would be rather than not claiming the IRWE and just shelling out the $120 and having your SSI check reduced without the benefit of that deduction. So his SSI check will be reduced to $423. But now he has wages of $800 a month. Now he does have to $120 out of his pocket for the IRWE, so let’s remember that he’s going to have some taxes taken out as well. But still, total financial outcome is $1,223. After paying those transportation costs, he still has over a thousand dollars, $1,103.

Well, what did he have before? Seven twenty one. Mmmm. One thousand and one, $721, I think the $1,001 is the better outcome. That’s awesome. Eric’s Medicaid, again, is not going to be affected at all. He retains his SSI. It’s reduced, but he retains it. So no state, including Virginia, no state takes away your Medicaid as long as you retain your SSI.

Well, look at the next slide. Well, how do we know that the Medicaid will not be affected? Federal law says if you are eligible for SSI, even a penny, you get Medicaid. Even if you lost your SSI because of wages, you get to keep your Medicaid -- full Medicaid under a special provision called 1619(b). Okay? And that’s not new. As I said, that -- that passed ‘89, I think, 1989. So it’s not new. This has been around a long time. And the State of Virginia does recognize this provision.

Well, how do you get 1619(b) eligibility? How do you make sure that the Medicaid continues even if your cash payment goes to zero because of wages? Well, 1619(b) eligibility’s quite straight forward. You have to have been eligible for SSI the month before. That certainly would be Eric and Carrie’s situation. Still meet the disability requirement. When you’re in these programs, you do get medical reviews periodically to make sure you’re still meeting the criteria and assuming that didn’t suddenly get cured, you would continue to meet that.

You have to pass what Medicaid calls the needs test or the use test. Very simple test. They don’t call you up even. They look in their computers to see, did you use your Medicaid in the last year? And if you haven’t used it, they will call you and they’ll say, "Well, you know, you have this job. Would you need your Medicaid in order to continue working?" And you would need to answer that yes. Okay? So you pass.

The next one is your gross wages, not unearned income, gross wages has to remain below a magic number called the threshold amount. And every state has a different number and Virginia, in the year 2014, the magic number, the threshold amount is $33,862. Every time I do training like this, about half the people that are watching the training don’t make that much. I mean that’s awesome. If you’re making over $33,000, you should be able to afford health insurance on your own. Okay? You don’t need Medicaid. But until you reach that level of income, you are guaranteed to reach -- to -- to be able to retain your full Medicaid just like you did all along with the SSI program.

Now there is a bit of a catch. When you get 1619(b) Medicaid, you’re actually in Social Security’s computer system as an SSI eligible individual who’s not getting a check. But you still have to meet the criteria for SSI which means your unearned income has to be below the limits that they apply and your resources have to be below whatever the -- the requirement is for that. So it isn’t like this is just carte blanche and you can do anything you want and keep your Medicaid. This simply allows your earned income primarily to be disregarded, but everything else has to remain the same.

So let’s look at some final words. I know this involves some math. The SSI calculation sheet can be a little intimidating. We don’t really expect you to be able to determine to the penny exactly what a job is going to do to someone’s SSI cash payment. We -- it would be nice if you could learn to use the SSI calculation sheet. It isn’t really rocket science. But if you don’t feel comfortable with that, remember the resources you have. Remember every county is covered by a Work Incentives Planning And Assistance, a.k.a, WIPA program and those folks are there to help you. This is exactly what they do. If you have a job goal for an individual, that individual should be able to meet or talk to a WIPA professional, we call them CWICs, remember Certified Community Work Incentive Coordinators, and those individuals will literally sit down with the beneficiary in your family and go over the Student Earned Income Exclusion, IRWEs, the calculation sheet, and show them what the outcome would be.

Now what we need you to do is to know that the SSI program loves work. And we need you to trumpet that to every student, every family, every time you hear these -- the folklore about I can’t work, I’m on SSI, they’ll take away my check, they will take away my Medicaid. We need you to be the frontline to say, "You know, that’s not true. You can work even full time and come out ahead financially and retain your Medicaid. You don’t have to just stay home. You can do something."

And we really, really, really want you to refer students with work goals and questions about work to the local WIPA program so that they can get that thorough analysis of what will happen to their benefits.

Well, that’s the end of our program. Hopefully, this has answered the questions that you have about how work affects the SSI and we’re glad that you were able to -- to participate. Have a great day.

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