Joseph Shapiro
speaker
255 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 26 Jul
Joseph Shapiro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 4.
Appearances
I heard about a family whose roof collapsed. They took a small loan from a friend. Social Security counted the loan as an asset, and the family lost benefits for their disabled son. And on Long Island in New York, I met Peter Belletti. He drove tractor trailers, but loading and unloading those rigs left him with nerve damage. He had pain, numbness in his feet. He had to stop working.
So he battled for years to get onto SSI. He kept getting turned down because of something he told SSI that he owned.
A one-week vacation timeshare in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.
Beletti said the timeshare was worthless. He didn't use it, and he couldn't sell it.
One reason, he owned it with his ex-wife. He could sell only half of his share, three and a half days a year, and whoever bought it would need to spend their vacation the same week as Mr. Beletti's ex-wife.
I'm sure there are better timeshare offers on the market.
I heard so many stories like this that just seem to defy common sense.
Yeah. And I want to tell you about Karen Williams, the woman who told me she knew how to squeeze her money to make a dollar holler.
Right? Yeah. She, too, ran into a problem with the asset limit. It all started when she bought a life insurance policy to pay for her own funeral.
She was just trying to do the right thing financially for her family.
I went to Philadelphia to visit Karen Williams, and she brought me to the Terry Funeral Home. It's a fixture in West Philadelphia. It's served generations of black families. And as one funeral service was ending, we met Gregory Burrell, the funeral home director.
Burrell came down to the lobby to meet with us. And he and William started talking about how past generations of Black families had little access to savings, but how their own parents and grandparents put aside money to pay for their funerals
Karen Williams, she didn't have an envelope tacked to her door, but she put money aside to save up for her policy. What she didn't understand, though, was that she'd bought the kind of insurance policy that had a modest cash value, that she could cash it in for $1,900. To SSI, that counted as an asset. Yeah, Lord.
In 2019, Williams got a letter from Social Security telling her, you better come to our office. And that's where a staffer told her that Social Security found records of that insurance policy, plus the couple hundred dollars that she'd saved in the bank. As a result, she'd gone over the asset limit by about $160 and had been for the last two years.
It said she'd been given an overpayment and it was demanding all of that money back, even though Social Security only discovered the problem now. And it gave her 30 days to pay it back.
Right. It was impossible. She didn't have that kind of money. You know, after she lost her SSI check, she had to get by with help from her children and friends. She found a lawyer at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia who helped her challenge the big bill she got from SSI. And eventually, Social Security started sending her benefit checks again.
And it conceded that it made a technical mistake in the way it handled her case. Social Security said it would waive the money she owed, but it's still deducting money from her checks. So Karen Williams is still fighting the Social Security administration.
This is Kathleen Romig. When I spoke to her, she worked at a Washington think tank called the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Earlier this year, she went to work at the Social Security Administration. She's written about raising the asset limit or ending it altogether.
By Social Security's own reporting, one in six people on SSI got overpayment notices last year. So that's about one million people on SSI just in one year told they owed money back to Social Security. Now, we did reach out to Social Security, and we talked to Commissioner Martin O'Malley. He was appointed by President Biden, and actually, he just stepped down.
But when we spoke, O'Malley pointed out that he's done some things in the past year to try to make it easier for people to apply for SSI, also to follow some of these complex rules. And here's one of the most ridiculous rules.
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