Another Story - NO Social Security Benefit for You.

[GailL1]

A family of (4) - a stay at home mom. (2) small kids and a dad that makes very good money from securing his degree and he is climbing the ladder.   Own their nice home with a mortgage, two cars, are financially stable with emergency savings, retirement accounts. The mom stays home with the small kids and takes care of the household.  Life is just a bed of roses for them . . . . the American Dream being realized.  

Then one day, an uninsured drunk driver hits the mother’s car head on - she lives but is left a quad-plegic  (Tetraplegia).  Life is turned upside down.  Initially, they had to get thru the monmouth health issues.  Health insurance helped, they were able to cover their part of the initial health cost from their emergency savings and what they got from their auto insurance uninsured motorist coverage.  

She got home and then the real cost started - the Dad had to hire others to take care of his wife and also cover someone that would replace her part of the household - taking care of the kids and running the household while the husband tried to make enough to cover these added expenses.  

There was NO Social Security Disability help for her or the family because she was not covered since she was not yet vested in the Social Security system and SS Disability is a single person benefit, meaning there are no spousal benefits for SS Disability.

In the time since 8-9 years, they have downsized with any profit going into the next home to reduce their mortgage cost.  The kids are now older and spend a great deal of their time helping their mom and the household - the Dad feels somewhat bad about this since he thinks they are missing out on their youth.  He still has a caregiver or two covering about 16 hours or so of the day and them him and the kids handle it the other times.  

He is in the same job but cringes each time that there is an economic down turn since the families health insurance and their retirement account is tied to the employer.  His employer has been great in consideration of his time off to take care of family matters; he tries to make this time up as much as he can and thus far this has worked well.

Yes, he still makes a good salary and has gotten raises thru the years but so have the caregivers and inflation cost have also risen including his auto and homeowners insurance as well as utilities.  They live on a very tight budget with their expenses - especially the caregiving expenses - which of course are a tax write out over the limits.  He also has to pay the matched Social Security and Medicare contributions for his caregiving employees - he also helps them fund their retirement account annually and shares in their healthcare cost just like his employer does for him.  These are long term employees that have worked out well for the family and their situation so he want to be as generous as he can for them. 

Now, one of the reasons I am posting this story is that this would be one of the people that would be affected by the “removing the cap” - him and his employer.   So I just wanted to point out that everybody may have a story.  In this family, the more money that comes in, the more it goes out for necessary expenses, just like most everybody else.