Q: Mrs. S of Ringgold, Ga., asks: “I recently visited the Social Security office in Chattanooga and I heard someone say that the office hours will be changing. Please tell me if that is the case and what the new hours will be.”
A: The office hours will change on Monday in all of the Chattanooga District offices: Chattanooga, Athens and Cleveland. The new hours will be 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday except for federal holidays.
Q Mr. H of Cleveland, Tenn., asks: “My wife is age 52 and has been determined by Social Security to be totally and permanently disabled. Although she averaged just over $24,000 annually the last five years of her employment, she only receives $744 monthly in SSA benefits. We have two acquaintances who also receive disability payments and whose payments seem to be considerably higher than my wife’s. To my knowledge one of these women has had little or no employment and the other one is receiving disability due to a drug addiction. Why would these individual’s benefits be higher than my wife’s? Have we been misinformed on how such payments are determined?”
A This is a very good question! It is also a very common question because many people often wonder how their benefit is figured and how their benefit compares to others.
Let’s start by discussing how an individual’s benefit is calculated. The amount of your Social Security benefit is based on your lifetime average earnings covered by Social Security. Your actual earnings are first adjusted or “indexed” to account for changes in average wages since the year the earnings were received. “Indexed” basically means that we bring your past earnings up to what they would be worth as of today. For retirement benefits, we calculate your average monthly indexed earnings during the 35 years in which you earned the most. We apply a formula to these 35 years of earnings and arrive at your basic benefit amount. For disability benefits, if you haven’t worked a full 35 years then it is based on the number of years required for the calculation. This could be as few as two but as many as 35 depending on the age at which you become disabled. It is still calculated in the same manner as your retirement benefits.
However, even if two people have a similar earnings pattern, there are factors that can make one individual’s benefit amount differ from someone else’s.
Some of the factors that can make one individual’s benefits greater than another’s are:
* If one individual’s lifetime earnings are higher, these higher earnings can result in higher benefits. Your benefit amount is based on how much you earned during your working career. If there were some years when you did not work or had low earnings, your benefit amount may be lower than if you had worked steadily at a lower rate.
* If an individual had little or no earnings but had a spouse that had significant earnings then their benefit amount could be based on their spouse’s earnings record. This could result in a higher benefit even though the benefit recipient had not been previously employed or was only employed for a short time.
Also note that SSA will not consider an individual disabled if drug and alcohol addiction is a material contributing factor to his/her disabling condition.
Further reference for this question and many others can be found at our website: www.socialsecurity.gov under the questions segment in the right column. Select “benefits”, then hit GO. Search by keyword.
Get answers to your Social Security questions each Thursday from the Social Security District Director Martin Coffey. Submit questions by writing to Business Editor John Vass Jr., Chattanooga Times Free Press, P.O. Box 1447, Chattanooga, TN 37401-1447, or by e-mailing him at jvass@timesfreepress.com.