By: Darrell Castle
Keep in mind that your disability begins when you become disabled
If you’re medically unable to work and want to speak to an experienced Social Security Disability Insurance attorney, call my office today at (901) 327-1212
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Video Transcript
If you’re medically unable to work and you’re entitled to Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, how much back pay are you entitled to?
Hi I’m Darrell Castle and I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee and that’s a pretty easy question to answer really. Your disability is based on when you became disabled.
So let’s say that your doctor told you as of today, January 19th, 2015, you are medically unable to work. And you went down and got your disability application in today. And let’s say that it took one year for the benefits to start because the first time it took about 6 months and they denied you – which they do about 70% of the time. And then after that, you filed an appeal and you had a good lawyer to do all of this so after one year, you were granted Social Security Disability benefits. So you would have one year of past-due benefits.
This has nothing to do with the ongoing payment, except this is what it’s based on. One year of the past-due – or one year of the amount that would have been ongoing – is paid to you.
Now how much of that would you lose in attorney fees if you had an attorney represent you? Well, 25%, not to exceed $6,000.
So, let’s say for simplicity’s sake that your benefits were $10,000 – your past-due benefits. So how much would your attorney get?
Obviously the $2,500 right?
Well let’s say your benefits were $30,000, which is pretty common. What is 25% of $30,000? $7,500. But that’s not what your attorney would get. He would get $6,000 because he’s limited to $6,000 no matter how much your past-due benefits are.
And I’ll tell you folks – this is a good lesson – 75% of something is a whole lot better than 100% of nothing.
So, your past-due benefits start on the date of your disability.