Do you have a retirement advisor? If not, you might need to consider getting one. Having such a financial advisor could prove useful to you down the line, but there’s something you need to know about them. When it comes to counseling people with disabilities, advisors of this sort may be a bit out of their depth.
Can Retirement Advisors Help When It Comes to Disability Benefits?
A retirement advisor was trying to help his client apply for Medicare at the age of 65 when he made a startling discovery. His client should have been on Social Security Disability Insurance for years before this application. That’s because the client had experienced a severe car crash that left him paralyzed over most of his body.
Neither the advisor, the person who was paralyzed, nor that victim’s family thought about applying for benefits until it was practically too late. Now, there’s a new push in the financial counseling community for advisors to understand the resources disability benefits provide. However, understanding the functioning of the Social Security Administration (SSA) can be daunting.
When applying for benefits, workers have to meet specific requirements determined by the SSA. Your condition must be expected to last over a year or result in your passing, you must have worked for at least five of the past ten years before you suffered your injury or illness, and you must not be able to perform reasonably comparable work. These strict guidelines along with an appeals process that has a 1.1-million-person long backlog make applying for disability benefits very complex.
Some experts are recommending that retirement advisors get in touch with local professionals like disability attorneys instead of learning the whole system themselves. This could allow them to better serve their clients and help get more people the benefits they need to remain financially stable. Do you think this will help more people stay financially stable through the SSDI application process?
