Using your PASS
Once Social Security approves your PASS, you basically need to follow the plan. If anything related to your PASS changes, be sure to tell Social Security immediately. This could include details about your work goal, expenses, or living situation. Social Security will work with you to amend your PASS to accommodate the changes. If you don’t accept the changes that Social Security suggests, they will suspend your PASS. If you later change your mind and accept the suggested amendments, your PASS will start again. The expert in charge of your PASS will contact you roughly every 6 months to see how things are going.
Be sure to keep receipts, bank statements, and other records of how you are funding your PASS. You must keep accounts that pay for PASS expenses separate from other accounts so that you can easily keep track of them.
Your PASS ends when you either:
- achieve your work goal and have paid all of your related expenses;
- are no longer disabled or blind; or
- do not follow your plan and don’t amend your PASS
How having income “not count” helps you achieve a work goal
To understand why PASS helps you live without benefits, you have to understand how the SSI program figures out the amount of your benefit check. The SSI benefit is meant to help you pay for your basic living expenses. When you have income, SSI assumes that you can use some of it to cover your basic living expenses and therefore replace some or all of your benefit. They also assume that there’s a part of that income that you can’t spend on these expenses and that can’t go to replacing your benefit. They address this issue by taking certain deductions from your income. For example, if your only income is $500 from an SSDI benefit, SSI assumes that only $480 of that can go to replacing your SSI. This is called your countable income. (To see how they arrive at that number, see the glossary entry for the countable income calculation). When they determine the amount of your benefit, they’ll take the amount you would normally be eligible for and subtract your countable income. If you’re an individual living independently, you would normally receive an $854.40 benefit in 2012, so your actual check will be for $390 (maximum benefit of $854.40 minus countable income of $480). You’ll still have $854.40 to spend on living expenses, but some of that will come from your SSDI income.
Along the same lines, they will not count certain expenses, like those that you have set aside for a PASS. If you set aside your entire SSDI check in a PASS, your SSI will increase to $854.40 , because that SSDI will no longer be counted as income. You’ll still be able to spend $854.40 a month on living expenses, but you’ll also be able to save $480 a month to pay for your PASS expenses. SSI does this because it encourages you to go to work and get off of benefits. Another way to think of it is that your SSI benefit replaces the income (from a job or SSDI benefit) that you save to achieve your work goal. You should notice from the above example that the most you can set aside under a PASS is the maximum SSI benefit.
PASS can also be a resource exclusion. If you have resources above the SSI limit of $2,000 a month, ($3,000 for couples) you can set aside some of them for a PASS. SSI will then not count them when determining if you are eligible for a benefit check.
