Yahoo Finance Social Security: Asset Limit Adjustment Could Allow Those Collecting SSI To Save Up to $8,000 More
Social Security’s Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program is designed to provide financial assistance to low-income elderly and disabled people, and in that respect it works fine — if you happen to be living in 1984. That’s the last time eligibility rules for SSI were updated, meaning many Americans today struggle to receive benefits. A group of lawmakers wants to change that through a new bill that would reform the SSI program.
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The bipartisan SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, introduced in September, would update SSI’s asset limits for the first time since the 1980s. The aim is to ensure that disabled and elderly Americans are “able to prepare themselves for a financial emergency without putting the benefits they rely on to live at risk,” according to the website of U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who announced the bill along with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).
According to Brown’s office, the current SSI program “punishes disabled and elderly Americans” for working, saving for the future and getting married. Under the current law, individuals receiving SSI benefits are limited to only $2,000 in assets. For married couples, it’s $3,000. The average current monthly benefit is $585 for individuals.
The Savings Penalty Elimination Act would raise those caps to $10,000 for individuals — an increase of $8,000 — and $20,000 for married couples. The caps would also be indexed to inflation moving forward.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted in a September report, current SSI limits are “not enough for beneficiaries to weather an emergency, let alone provide stability or save for the future.”
When the SSI program was created in 1972, policymakers set resource limits of $1,500 for individuals and $2,250 for couples, according to the CBPP. That gradually rose to $2,000 for individuals and $3,000 for couples, which represented the only time in 50-plus years that the limits were changed.
The CBPP estimates that if resource limits had been indexed to inflation in 1972, they would be $9,929 for an individual and $14,893 for a couple in 2023 — about five times as high as they are today.
Proposed legislation to update the limits has support from a diverse mix of more than 300 organizations, including AARP, JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Evangelicals, Microsoft, the Bipartisan Policy Center, The Arc of the United States and Catholic Charities.
The challenge of meeting SSI eligibility rules was addressed in a recent conversation between NPR’s Deepa Fernandes and Patrice Jetter, a New Jersey-based disability rights activist. A transcript of their chat was included on the website of Boston’s WBUR.
Jetter noted that when the law was first introduced decades ago, $2,000 was “a lot of money.”
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“But in this day and age, $2,000 might be the cost of someone’s rent now for one month,” Jetter added. “How would you do that every single month? And [it’s] not just rent. Where I live, you also have to pay all the utilities. You have to pay electric, heat and hot water, gas, so even if you had $2,000 in the bank, you still wouldn’t have enough money to make it if you had to pay for everything without the assistance.”
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