Hi guys,
I thought I would let you guys know how wrong I was about making one of the most important decisions of my life.
I turned in retirement from my company– instead of taking advantage of the Companies Member Disability that I had paid for all of 39 years. I gave up all of those rights by retiring. I did not know that would happen; because I did not understand the whole social security and disability issue. It is actually pretty simple: if you retire: you give up all of your Company rights for Disability or anything else. For some unknown reason — I did not see that.
When I called human resources; they made me feel ashamed that I had used most of my sick leave. And I have this built-in thing of trying to do what is right. I had no clue that health care premiums would double over the member premiums — where with my company disability the Member would get member premiums until age 66. And the list could go on and get pretty lengthy — the bottom line is I have just been too sick and stressed out to make decisions. And when I looked for help — I got bad advice.
And it is not always what the Doctors think — a person has to fight for his rights. My brother is one instance of being unsuccessful in getting disability from social security. He needs it worse than most that I have seen. Looking back, I would have been successful thru my company getting disability (at 60% pay until age 66), where getting disability thru social security may be a ton of stress that may end in failure.
Anyway, that is my sad story. This 1/2 of pay for life with increasing medical premiums is not going to last very long. I do have some 401-k money that I need to organize to get into American Funds — so I will not have to worry about losing that in bad decision making.
All of you guys understand retirement; so you probably will not benefit from my pain. I got to really work on turning things around; but it is sure hard when you are so capable of making such poor decisions.
Hope the sun is shining in your state!!
David
David, you really got had. I think you should talk to a lawyer. If it was the company human resources people giving you the advice to take retirement, you might have a case (for what depends on OK law, but you should still talk to a lawyer). The company has to have known you should be filing for disability if you’d — duh! — used up your sick leave!
And what’s this about glaucoma? First I’ve heard of it. Given the combination of conditions you have now, you should go ahead and file for Social Security disability. It’s not that stressful. I can’t intervene in your case in any way but I can tell you what you’ll need. Mainly doctors’/hospitals’ names, addresses, phone numbers and treatment dates and all your start and stop work dates if you were away from the office for a month or more at any one time. It’s possible your “onset date” is earlier than the date you actually quit working if you were in and out.
Employers, who do that, especially after all the years you worked there, ought to be hung up by whatever hurts most. That is really bad.
Take care of yourself and take any action you can to square this.
-Tracy, Banklady.com
Read another response about the Social Security application process with disability
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