In an hour and a half, it’s off to the Social Security office to do battle with the bureaucracy again. I’m going to try to be there when the door opens.
Apparently they’re cutting my benefit by something over $235 a month. The reason? I earned more than they thought so they’re raising my benefit.
Huh? you ask.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought.
Friday afternoon, this amazing communication arrived by snail-mail:
We checked our records to seer if any changes in your benefits are necessary.
We are increasing your benefit amount to give you credit for additional earnings which were not included when we figured your benefit before.
What We Will Pay and When
You will receive a payment on or about December 8, 2010 for $1,442.40. This payment includes both your new regular monthly benefit and benefits due from January 2010, the month of the increase, through November 2010.
After that you will receive your regular monthly payment of $1,021.70.
WTF?!?? My regular benefit is and has been, since the start, $1,257.50. The “new” monthly payment with its “increase” is a $236 cut in pay!
Looking back over the correspondence I’ve received from the Social Security Administration over the past year, I see that at one point they decided my benefit was $1068.40. I must not have noticed that; otherwise I would’ve had a shitfit at that point…more likely, I imagined that was the net amount. The fact is, though, the figures in these memos are always gross amounts, way, way, way off from what really lands in your bank account. At any rate, that figure never materialized: the gross payment has always been $1,257, and that’s the amount they took away from me for the crime of earning such a vast amount in part-time adjunct teaching that I owed $340 in extra taxes.
Evidently, the SSA can at any moment decide to change your benefit amount, and evidently whatever they’ve been doing based on whatever they figured sometime in the past is moot.
Isn’t it interesting how they invariably send these damn things so they appear in your mailbox on a Friday afternoon after their offices are closed? Then you get to stew about it over the weekend.
In fact, this meant I got to work over the weekend, instead of having time to myself as planned. A raft of student papers was due at 11:59 last night. Spending half the day at the SS office will mean I won’t have enough time to read an entire batch of papers today, unless I work until midnight. So, to stave off a half-overnighter, I spent Sunday afternoon reading the papers that came in early. Fortunately, that included about half of them, so there should only be about three or four hours of work to do today.
But that was not what I wanted to do with Sunday afternoon.
We got the same letter. But refiguring and payback for a whole year caused a one time increase of $20. Seems unlikely. But who wants to kick the sleeping tiger since at least it isn’t a decrease?
Let us know what happens.