Disability Living Allowance: Fill & Download for Free

How easy is it in the US to live off welfare and not work?I am disabled, living off $771 a month in combined Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Veterans Disability Compensation at 10% service connection. I am unemployable due to multiple physical and mental health issues, combined with being over 50, finding a job would be difficult at best anymore, anyhow.I am not currently homeless, but almost all my income goes to rent and utilities. I no longer qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (I lost my $15 monthly stipend in October after the state decreased its allowable deductions, making my ‘disposable income’ higher). I do not qualify for Medicaid because I bring in too much money (maximum gross income for single males has to be under $500 a month), and at 53 am still too young for Medicare.The only way I eat regularly is courtesy of Meals on Wheels, going to several local food pantries a month, and the graciousness of friends who invite me to dinner, either in their homes or occasionally out to eat (nothing fancy nor too expensive, meals kept to under $20). My own income allowed for food is about $100 a month, which includes eating out if I am out and about on a doctor’s appointment where by the time I get home I am too fatigued to cook.Since I don’t receive housing or utility assistance, after paying $500 a month in rent and holding $100 for groceries, I have to somehow manage all the bills (phone, gas, electricity, water, sewer, and trash) on the balance.Sure I have ‘free’ medical care thru VA, but at only 10% service connection, that means I am lucky to be actually seen by a doctor once a year…the rest of the time I have to struggle with emergency room visits and trying to qualify for patient assistance to get prescriptions.If you call this an easy life, you are welcome to it. I call it barely existing, let alone surviving. It certainly isn’t living.

My son is autistic.Because of this, I am entitled to Disabled Living Allowance on his behalf, together with Carer’s Allowance and additional Tax Credits.While he’s high-functioning, he does have some issues which were quite expensive. For example, sometimes he cannot bear the school bus, and I have to drive him to school - a 35-mile round trip. Also, he cannot stand the feel of close-fitting clothes, so he’s been wearing mens’ sizes since he was 10, just to stop him wigging out at the sensation of shirt collars and trouser waists against his skin.Before his diagnosis, I was genuinely struggling financially - keeping food in the house was a particular battle, as he’d sneak out of bed in the night and eat everything in sight. Fortunately, the extra income has helped defray many of these costs, and made for a happier home as we’re not constantly arguing over clothes buying, food, and all the other things he gets in his head that he absolutely must have.

I guess by this point, she was, strictly speaking, my EX mother in-law but still…We’d been officially divorced only a few weeks although separated a while. I’d married a ‘dry alcoholic’ who renewed his first love, the booze, after a year of marriage. The next year was a nightmare of violence, abuse, utter fear, intimidation & nightmares I can’t even begin to relive & describe. I loved the man, deeply & wholeheartedly, but I was rightly afraid of the alcoholic he’d become. Following a plan of tough love to try & make him hit rock-bottom or see he needed help, I ended up backing myself into a corner where divorce was the only option I had left.His mother knew what I was doing & why. She wouldn’t let him live in her house either. I got him somewhere else to live rent free. He got the majority of the contents of our home (I stupidly even packed it & brought it to him). He cleared the bank accounts, actively blocked all my sources of finances he couldn’t take, claimed & received FULL DISABILITY LIVING ALLOWANCE due to his alcoholism and also received daily food parcels from a local food bank. He became a regular visitor to both the A&E department & the wards of our local hospital, as well as the local constabulary due to his drunken behaviour, and I regularly got telephone calls from doctors telling me they weren’t sure he’d last the night. He pulled through eventually each time, and managed to further verbally and/or physically abuse me and/or the staff as an added f-you for our considerations.I was left with no money, a frozen income, huge debts and a broken heart. I quietly filed for divorce and wanted only a clean break. We had no children jointly, no assets, no savings, no property. I got that clean break I wanted, and nothing more.A few weeks after the divorce was finalised I was still (and would be for the next few months) paying off our joint accumulated debts and my now ex MIL knocked at the door asking about a camera he thought he’d left in the loft. I didn’t know whether he had or not, but I said either way he wasn’t having it.She was dumbfounded! She demanded it! I reminded her the divorce was final. I reminded her he’d taken everything else, certainly everything he’d moved in (despite selling any duplicates we’d had & spending that money too) with and then some more too. I reminded her of the debts he’d gotten us into with his drinking, how he’d promised to pay half our outstanding debts and never did. How he’d actively gone out of his way to screw my finances and purposely left me almost destitute… if there was any camera there, it was being sold to meet our debts.Her reply? She had the receipt for the camera and she’d bought it 4 years ago!I thanked her for such a lovely gift…To say she was livid is an understatement! Her darling boy left me in thousands of pounds of debt, telling me he’d paid things and spending the money secretly, hacked my bank accounts, stolen my savings & then proceeded to drink away literally hundreds of pounds a week without a care for anyone else. By this time he’d also physically abused her husband, various police & A&E staff, scared a 14 year old boy senseless, threatened to kill us and burn down our home, physically attacked me and even her, his own mother too. I’d stood by him & supported him for soooo long, even after everything he’d done, only finally walking away when he told me about his new girlfriend but because I wouldn’t hand over an old camera that was only a few hundred pound new, she was throwing a shitfit on my doorstep! I was being so unfair & unreasonable apparently… I ended up shutting the door on her when she tried to force her way in.It was no less than 2 weeks after that he passed away. He was again admitted to our local hospital. I found out later she’d been very vocal in telling the staff he was now divorced so I wasn’t to be contacted, under any circumstances despite most of them knowing me by now. She made it clear I was not to be told anything at all. Mutual acquaintances were told specifically not to tell me. There were also strict instructions not to tell me where he was nor anything about the funeral either. It was made extremely clear I was not to attend.Now I understand her pain, I know she was suffering too, but she knew why I’d divorced him, and it wasn’t because I’d stopped loving him either. So yeah, I’d say letting me find out my recently ex-husband had passed away through a friend seeing it on Facebook of all places is a pretty mean & low stunt to pull…