How Do SSI Recipients Deal With Debt?

• In Event: Disability, Policy, and Financial Hardship

Abstract

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is one of the few remaining cash assistance programs in the United States, but there is little qualitative evidence about the financial lives of the eight million Americans who rely on it. Maximum monthly benefits for SSI typically amount to about 75 percent of the federal poverty level, or $967 for an individual in 2025. Despite being one of the last remaining cash assistance programs for low-income people in the U.S. safety net, the poverty-reducing potential of Supplemental Security Income is limited: it brought less than a third of its recipients out of poverty in 2022. SSI’s poverty-level benefit amounts and policy rules that limit recipients’ ability to supplement SSI from earned and unearned sources raise questions about how recipients make ends meet. In this study, we use nationally representative interview data from the American Voices Project (AVP) (N = 111) to ask four questions: (1) To what extent do SSI recipients use credit cards, bank loans, borrowing from friends and family, and other forms of debt to get by each month?, (2) What strategies do SSI recipients use to manage debt?, (3) What narratives do SSI recipients tell about their debt use?, and (4) How do SSI recipients’ debt use, strategies, and narratives about debt vary across the life course? Preliminary findings demonstrate that SSI recipients tend to take on debt for large and/or unexpected expenses that exceed their monthly budget. However, few SSI recipients report being able to make debt payments, which they say weighs on them psychologically.

Authors

• Jamie Koenig, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Callie Freitag, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Pooja Paode, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Co-Author