We feel very fortunate.
xcellent reviews have begun arriving for How to Get Social Security Disability Benefits. Here’s one from Diane Donovan, Senior Contributor for the prestigious Midwest Book Review:
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“Anyone who has tried to get on disability for any reason well knows what a challenge it is to qualify for benefits. More so than most assistance programs, disability has been identified as having the most potential for abuse—and therefore, is one of the most challenging programs to understand and qualify for.
“Don Sloan’s How to Get Disability Benefits: What You Need to Know offers a solution to successfully gaining benefits through this program. It does the hard footwork of covering the system and how it operates for newcomers who may have little clue about how to achieve their goals.
“It opens with a foundation series of chapters that define disability, discuss benefits, and help readers determine if they are eligible for the program. This in and of itself is a winning approach, because the law is quite specific about what constitutes the kinds of disability that qualify for benefits.
“It’s essential that applicants properly prepare for first contact and understand the different responses that lead to winning approval for disability status. Again: there are very specific routines and approaches to this process that, without Sloan’s book, would be overlooked or misunderstood by the typical applicant who holds little prior familiarity with the disability system.
“Under another hand, it would have been all too easy for this book to end at this point.
“But perhaps the greatest asset to How to Get Disability Benefits lies in its wide-ranging coverage of the aftermath of placing an application, from an invaluable chapter on ‘Making Ends Meet While Waiting’ to a listing of ‘Top 10 Disabilities’ and discussions of how much one can receive from the disability program, and how long benefits typically last.
“Over the years, the complicated disability structure has become a quagmire of confusion. This often prevents legitimately disabled applicants from navigating the system enough to successfully gain what is owed to them.
“Sloan walks readers through any confusion, presenting sample experiences, letters, social welfare, and legal insights alike. These represent especially essential keys to navigating the waiting period, encouraging cultivating financial resources that can be tapped before benefits kick in.
“This approach sets this book apart from any other.
“The waiting periods, which can evolve into years and involve more than one period of time, are particularly insidious aspects of the disability system that the author navigates with specific insights and advice.
“How to Get Disability Benefits: What You Need to Know” is a practical primer that should top the reading list of anyone newly disabled. It tiptoes through a minefield of potentially confusing routines and processes which will likely be alien to most new applicants, employing case histories, examples, and insights that successfully gain disability benefits.
“No other book on the market holds such specific, clear advice; and none include the practical considerations of income generation both on and off disability that are keys to long-term survival. How to Get Disability Benefits is very, very highly recommended as a key acquisition for applicants, reference, healthcare, and individual libraries alike.”
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And here’s what the venerable Kirkus Reviews in New York City had to say:
“A clear and refreshingly tough-minded disability-plan.”
“This work’s best feature is its hard-won fighting spirit—especially considering the fact that the bureaucracy that Sloan describes is likely to provoke anger. Readers facing this daunting process will be grateful for such a knowing guide.”
“It is a guide to getting the most out of Social Security’s disability benefits.
“At the start of this guide, Sloan emphasizes that, unlike the authors of many other books on Social Security benefits, he isn’t just reading and simplifying written regulations—he’s offering advice from his own experience of applying for and receiving disability benefits, so that his readers can “outlast the unforeseen waits and frustrating turndowns…and come out whole and alive on the other side.”
“In these attractively designed pages, Sloan walks readers through every step of what can be a strange, Byzantine process, beginning with determining what qualifies as a disability in the eyes of the Social Security Administration.
“The book asserts that regulations are nowhere more impenetrable than when money is moving from the government to the individual, and this includes Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income.
“Sloan clearly states what he posits as an uncomfortable fact: that the SSA often seems grudging in paying out benefits, despite the fact that taxpayers have often long paid into it:
“As long as you can struggle into work and collect a day’s wage,” he writes, “the SSA will assume that you must be okay and not really qualified to draw down on the disability pot of money to which you have contributed all these years.”
“Sloan straightforwardly threads his readers through the labyrinth of SSA regulations, offering simple, affably phrased practical advice for every step, from defining and extensively documenting their disability to gauging the necessity of legal representation and the nitty-gritty of how to handle oneself during disability interviews.
“The e-book includes links to a vast amount of helpful information, but his work’s best feature is its hard-won fighting spirit—especially considering the fact that the bureaucracy that Sloan describes is likely to provoke anger.
“Readers facing this daunting process will be grateful for such a knowing guide.”
— Kirkus Reviews