A MS Patients’ Story: Tax Season 2014: Filing SSDI plus Earned Income and How I Totally Screwed Up 2013 –

Like many of you, I have Social Security Disability (SSDI) as my main source of income. I started drawing it in August of 2009, and in February of 2010, I went to the IRS site to file my federal EZ tax return, the form I’d always used each year of my working life.

My only source of income was SSDI and I had no taxes taken out. After plunking in the numbers, a box popped up stating that I had no tax withheld and owed none, so I need not file a tax return—and it booted me off the site.

Pleased by the good news and not a little bewildered, I went to the SSA.gov site and read that people on SSDI can make up to $25,000 per year and not owe federal tax. Confident that the IRS no longer wanted to hear from me, I did not file a tax return from that point on. The T-men had as much as told me I was off the grid for good.

My interpretation of these facts was a bit bone-headed, however, as I was to find out when my dream apartment came available in December of 2014 and the application process began to approve me for tenancy.

Two days before I was to move in to my new apartment, my application was suddenly denied. I indicated that I had some earned income in 2013, but hadn’t filed a tax return. They needed to verify the earned income and couldn’t do so without a tax document. I was stunned and panicked. It was December 29^th, I was still living in my mother’s drafty old Victorian house; my upstairs renter took a powder late one night in the middle of the month, stiffing me for the December rent—which I needed to pay the utilities. The movers were set to come on December 31^st, New Year’s Eve day. I had nowhere else to go. Having exhausted all the low-income senior communities in my tiny town of Tecumseh (there are only two, and the other one had a waiting list of 25 people), I would have to look in the neighboring town of Adrian, at the notorious senior high-rises or, worse still, section 8 housing where unattended little children were known to ride their bikes up and down the halls of the elderly and disabled wing, and where, as the gossip went, there had been a recent infestation of bed bugs.