Surviving (or not) on Minimum Wage

Surviving (or Not) on Minimum Wage

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5441487&page=1

If people cannot survive on minimum wage, then how are they expected to survive on disability benefits, which are even less?!

In addition to all the things the young, healthy stereotypical minimum wage worker pays for, disabled people need to pay for all manner of medical care (you can’t get Medicaid till you’ve been on SSDI for two years), prescriptions (which I’m told Medicaid doesn’t cover), and personal assistance (I need a house cleaner, and I’m not allowed to drive due to uncontrolled fainting spells so I also need help with errands). Some people complain about the fact that our local bus fare has gone up to $2 (and is going up again); they don’t realize that Paratransit costs even more per ride.

The last I heard, our local waiting list for subsidized housing is ten years long. That’s no help for someone who is disabled and unable to work NOW; if you ask among the homeless population, you’ll learn that a lot of them are disabled and living in the streets because rent – even shared – is more than they can afford from their disability checks.

My late best friend, who was disabled after only a few years in the work force, was getting about $300 a month; another gets only $645 a month and tells me that she would only get $10 a month in food stamps which is not worth the wear and tear on her body to stand in line at the welfare office to apply. Like me, neither of them had the benefit of a husband to help with the bills that their disability check doesn’t cover. One was blessed with a mother who had enough money to pay her rent; the other has lost her parents and thus begs and borrows from friends and relatives every month.

Even my SSDI check, if I ever get it, would be less than a full-time minimum wage paycheck, and I worked for 30 years, most of it near the Social Security tax cut-off, which means my check is about as big as it’s gonna get for anyone. When I first sucked up my pride and applied 8 years ago, I did the math, and the check was about $200 less than my essential monthly bills; it wasn’t enough to make ends meet, but it would slow the drain on my savings account so it would be that much longer before I had to ask friends and relatives for help. At this point, everything having gone up substantially except the amount of SSDI I’d be getting, I’m afraid to do the math and find out how much the shortfall would be.

If you’re believing the talk show hosts who rant about people too lazy to work living the high life on SSDI, you’d better do some research into how much you’d be getting, and figure out if you’d be able to make ends meet on that pittance. Unless you have a husband with a really good job, or are independently wealthy, my guess is you can’t. http://www.ssa.gov/planners/calculators.htm can tell you how much you’d be getting each month if you became disabled today.

Yes, I have a friend on SSDI who goes on an annual winter vacation to somewhere warm ... because her mother pays for it rather than have her suffer extreme pain in the cold. I have a friend on SSDI who goes to expensive concerts ... because friends pay for her tickets in return for favors she does for them throughout the year. Those things aren’t in the budget if your only household income comes from SSDI.

More common is a local lady I met at a craft fair. Knowing how long these items took to make, I was stunned by the low prices on them: barely more than the cost of the kit to make them. She acknowledged that her goal was simply to break even. Several years earlier, someone had given her a $50 gift certificate to Michaels, and she used that to start her "business". If she put a higher price on her crafts, she wouldn’t sell them, and wouldn’t be able to afford more craft supplies to entertain herself for the next year. She loves to craft and can’t afford the supplies from her SSDI checks, so she sells for break-even prices only because it’s preferable to not being able to do any stitching at all.