Food Stamp Application: Fill & Download for Free

I saw on a comment you put on another answer that you are 36, single, no kids, and work as a cashier living within your means. I'm not being sarcastic or snippish when I say good for you.I was 37 when I had to get unemployment and food stamps. Prior to that I was technically single (living with my boyfriend) in our newly built home with two new cars and we were living within our means and had enough to eat out a couple nights each week and to be able to buy extras without much thought. Then the housing bubble burst. He lost his job that was pulling in $2400-$5000/month. Ok, no more dinners out and no more random spending and pay a little closer attention to the bills. But that income was gone and there were no programs to help people yet. One car got repossessed. The house was foreclosed on. We moved to an apartment we could afford on my salary and he got loans to go to culinary school. We were still within our means, but barely. Then I lost my job, laid off because of the economy. No income. No way to pay rent or get gas for the car (which was fully paid for) or buy food.I, like you, had prided myself on never having to take government assistance. Would you say I shouldn't have applied for assistance to eat? There were no jobs. I couldn't even get a retail job and I had over 10 years of retail experience. Every job had literally hundreds of applicants. So, yes, we got food stamps. Around $136/month for 2 people. And my unemployment? I qualified for the maximum benefit of $240/week. 70% less than what I'd been making at my job. We sold everything we could that had any value. We were living within our means for the salary I had been making, which is what you say you do, but suddenly that salary was gone.If someone loses their job but owns an iPhone that they purchased before, should they be required to get rid of the iPhone to receive benefits? I think you should read this article: This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps. Maybe you'll get the idea that anyone, anyone, can suddenly end up needing public assistance through no fault of their own.And, yes, I despised every minute of it.

The White House claims that since Trump's election, "nearly 7 million Americans have been lifted off of food stamps." If true, is it because they are now earning enough not to need food stamps or because they were kicked off the program?I was ‘lifted off food stamps’ back in November 2019 (my final benefit month was October), just ahead of Trump’s announcement that his rule change would remove approximately 700000 people from SNAP eligibility.Ahead of that change, my state decided to decrease the eligible deductions one has when determining SNAP eligibility, thereby effectively giving applicants greater ‘discretionary income’, increasing the amount of money they have to spend for food when calculating how much they can receive in SNAP.Since my income, though disabled, isn’t derived from Social Security Disability (SSDI), I fall into that catch-all category of ‘able-bodied adults without dependents’ since I was required to recertify every three months, just like persons who have to undergo recertification to demonstrate they are working, in school, or otherwise meet the requirements to receive SNAP benefits more often than the federal maximum of three months every three years.Yeah, $15 a month in SNAP isn’t a whole lot to lose in the grand scheme, but when your income is only $771 a month in the first place ($783 beginning Feb 1 due to COLA adjustment), it is still a major loss of income, especially as prices for food continue to rise.If that can happen to me with as little income as I have, I can certainly see it happening to others as well, both better and worse off than I am. To Trump, it is all a numbers game without any regard to the economic reality those who have a limited fixed income subsist on.________________________________________________________________________________As much as I hated to do so, I have disabled further commenting since people were going off on too many irrelevant topics unrelated to the conversation at hand in relation to the original question.

I retired from DSHS where I BY MYSELF handled all suspected fraud for our co, determining if there was any agency error involved (worker didn’t get form signed that gave us the right to verify by any means that what applicant wrote down was truthful and that food stamps would only be used to purchase and prepare for people listed on application, incl minor children). I also decided whether it was worth my time & the state’s money to proceed. If someone called the hotline to say their neighbor or (ex-friend) on welfare was babysitting a child for $50 a week under the table, I stuck those at the bottom of my ten to fifteen year old cases, (statute of limitations started when case was opened) because usually it was a single mother with one child & $50 a week would buy toilet paper, dish soap, laundry soap, tampons, deodorant, razor blades, baby powder, shampoo, bath soap, diapers, baby wipes, paper towels, cat &/or dog food, kitty litter, all the things food stamps wouldn’t buy. Why make life harder for someone struggling AND you can’t get blood out of stone.The cases I went after were the provable, prosecutable cases of fraud that I could send to the Pierce Co Prosecutor, one file to prosecutor, one file to Office of Special Investigation, one file for my files. These were cases where the mother wrote “father unknown” on the birth certificate while she collected welfare for herself & her child(ren), food stamps, and full Medicaid for self & children, all the time living with the father of one or more of her children, often a guy working construction or another well-paying job. I had two field agents, one a brilliant retired Tacoma homicide detective, the other an extremely sweet retired highway patrol motorcycle cop who just couldn’t think like a crook. I once sent the HP to watch a house where I knew the father was living, even though she said he was living with his brother. In WA, where you sleep 4 out of 7 nights in a week is your physical residence. The highway patrol cop comes back the next day & tells me the father isn’t living at the welfare mother’s address. I asked him where he got that info because it had only been one day; he answered that he’d knocked on the door and asked her & she said no, he lived with his brother. DUH!I also had too many cases to count of people applying for welfare for children that weren’t theirs or children they didn’t have custody of. My first case was a woman who came in for replacement food stamps because she said her three year old flushed them down the toilet while she was putting her makeup on. She told my supervisor she got the card for food stamps in the mail, went down the next morning to the office to turn her authorizing card in for the food stamps (when they gave out books of actual food stamp coupons) came home to put her makeup on to go shopping & set the food stamps on the toilet tank & her three year old flushed them down the toilet. My supervisor replaced them. When he told me, I told him he was a dumbass (for years I reminded him) 1. She had no reason to take them from her purse into the bathroom. 2. Either she’d put her makeup on BEFORE she picked up the food stamps & went shopping from the office, or she was lying. I sent one of my field guys out & found she had the birth certificate for the toddler but had lost custody of him shortly after he was born due to her drug problem. Her older child had been living for years with the child’s father in Eastern WA. This woman came into the office a week later & tried to attack me but I pushed her off & other workers grabbed her & the cops took her away. Fraud AND assault.I only bothered in cases where there were assets the state could seize, cases where the father denied being the father & claimed the woman & child(ren) were simply renting rooms, thus lying to investigators. These were cases where we could order DNA tests. Smart cheaters never applied for money because we couldn’t order DNA if all they received was food stamps and medical. Usually, the working father would agree to pay back the state to keep the mother of his child out of jail.The sick, sad thing was DSHS’s JOBS Program paid for two years of college or vocational training, while paying for daycare for the parent(s) car repairs incl new tires, gas for the car, clothes for the new job, training, or interview clothes all the while they continued to get welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid, and so many refused to participate as they just wanted to sit on their butts & do nothing. I helped write the JOBS Program back in the day.Only going after real fraud cases with a good chance of recouping the money, meant I was sending prosecutable cases recouping over $1.5 million the last year I worked. Going after food stamp fraud was a federal mandate for each state but politics being as stupid as they are, two weeks before I retired, DSHS dropped my position because all the money I recouped was placed in the state’s general fund, not returned to DSHS’s budget. No fraud investigation after that. Again, everything I write on Quora is my personal opinion based on my experiences; the government may have their own opinions.