Hello. This is Springfield, Missouri disability attorney, Jason Krebs. In today’s video, I thought we’d answer the question how disabled do I have to be to receive disability benefits in Missouri or Arkansas?
The main question that would be important to look at here is how old are you? When you’re over 50, the law tilts in your favor, and then even more so when you hit 55, but age is one of the most important things in Social Security Disability law, and when you hit 50, it becomes much easier for you to win a case.
This is not to say that you don’t need significant medical documentation. You do. You need a lot of medical documentation, especially here in southwest Missouri or northwest Arkansas. What that means is where the law tilts in your favor, what it means is your past work is much more important than somebody that is 45 or even 49, because they have to show that there’s no work that they could do whatsoever of all the different jobs that they say exist in the national economy. There’s over 12,000 jobs that they say exists in the national economy.
If you are over the age of 50, the law is that SSA looks at your past work, and they figure out if you have any transferrable skills to something easier, typically physically easier. If you have a history of heavy or hard physical labor, manual labor, if you don’t have a college degree or advanced training of some sort, your case is typically much easier to win. Again, you still have to have the medical documentation to support your case, but, Social Security recognizes that if you’re 50 or 55 years old and have worked construction or heavy work, then it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to adapt real well or that anybody’s going to hire you for a sit down job.
It’s important to understand though if you’re over the age of 50, you should get an attorney involved, because you can make mistakes in the application process and lose a lot of those benefits that you have under the law or waive them if you don’t do things correctly in the application process.
We do offer a free book to Missouri and Arkansas residents. You can get that at https://krebslawoffice.com or give us a call at 417-883-5886 or 1-800-345-0535.
Thanks for watching and best of luck