The call came in about twenty minutes into a local Jacksonville radio segment on Social Security and benefits, sometime in late January 2026. The host was fielding questions about SSDI eligibility windows when a calm, measured voice broke through. “I’m a foreman, I make decent money, but I have literally nothing saved — and I don’t know if I’m ever going to catch up.” I was listening from my laptop at the time. I grabbed my notebook and wrote down one word: call back.
It took me three days to track down Tommy Kirby through the station’s producer. When I finally reached him on a Thursday afternoon, he was on a lunch break at a job site off I-295, eating a sandwich in his truck. He agreed to talk. We ended up going well over an hour.
The Voice on the Radio — and the Reality Behind It
Tommy Kirby is 36 years old, a construction foreman with nearly 14 years in the trades, and by most visible measures, he’s doing well. He earns roughly $76,000 a year managing crews for a mid-size residential contractor in the Jacksonville metro area. He’s engaged to his partner, Deja, who is finishing her final year of nursing school. They share an apartment in Arlington. There are no children yet.
But when I asked him to walk me through his retirement savings balance, he went quiet for a moment. “Zero,” he said. “Not like, a little. I mean zero.” He laughed — not the kind of laugh that means something is funny.
That fall happened on October 14, 2023. Tommy was on scaffolding at a framing job in Mandarin when a platform shifted. He came down hard on his right shoulder — a torn labrum, a fractured clavicle, and a six-month recovery that changed his financial life in ways he’s still sorting through today.
When Disability Pay Meets Real-World Costs
Short-term disability coverage is not standardized. Depending on the employer policy and state, benefits typically replace somewhere between 50% and 70% of a worker’s pre-disability income, according to the Social Security Administration’s overview of disability programs. Tommy’s employer policy — which he admitted he’d barely read before the injury — replaced 58% of his base wages.
On paper, that meant roughly $3,380 per month instead of his normal take-home of around $4,900 after taxes. The gap was $1,520 every single month. Over six months, that added up to more than $9,100 in missing income — money he had to pull from savings just to cover rent, utilities, and groceries.
“I had about $11,000 in savings going into the injury,” Tommy told me. “I thought that was a pretty good cushion. I found out it wasn’t.” By the time he returned to work in April 2024, he had roughly $1,200 left. The retirement account he’d started in 2022 had been cashed out before Christmas 2023 — a move he said he “hated doing” but felt he had no other choice.
Sending Money Home While Building Nothing for Himself
The disability gap wasn’t the only drain. Tommy has been sending money to family members in the Jacksonville area for years — a pattern that predates the injury and continues today. His mother, 61, is on a fixed income after a back injury of her own ended her career in home health care. His younger sister, 29, is raising two children largely on her own after a separation.
“I’m not going to stop,” Tommy said plainly when I asked whether he’d considered cutting back. “My mom worked two jobs for most of my childhood. My sister is doing everything she can. I can’t just — stop because it’s inconvenient for my 401k.” The tone wasn’t defensive. It was settled, like a decision made long ago that he has no interest in revisiting.
He currently sends his mother $400 a month and helps his sister with roughly $250 in irregular contributions — groceries, a car repair last fall, school supplies. That’s approximately $650 a month leaving his account before he factors in his own rent, his portion of living expenses while Deja finishes school, and the truck payment that came due in February 2025.
As Tommy explained it to me, the math never seems to close. “On paper I look fine. If you ran my taxes, you’d think I was fine. But there’s always something. There’s always something that needs $800 that I didn’t budget for, and then I’m back to zero again.” He paused. “I feel like I’m running on a treadmill that’s moving just a little faster than I can keep up with.”
The Small Win That Cracked Things Open
Here is where Tommy’s story turns — not dramatically, but in the quiet way that most financial turning points actually happen. In January 2026, his employer rolled out an updated benefits package that included a 3% employer match on 401(k) contributions for the first time. The company had offered a retirement plan before, but without a match, Tommy had always found reasons to defer enrollment.
“My supervisor basically walked into the job trailer and said, ‘If you’re not signed up by the 31st, you’re leaving free money on the table.’ That phrase — free money — I don’t know, it just clicked differently this time.” Tommy enrolled on January 28, 2026. He’s contributing 4% of his gross pay, which means the employer match brings his effective contribution rate to 7%.
The “small win” he referenced on that radio call was this: $890 in an account with his name on it, growing slowly, not yet touched. For someone who watched a prior retirement account disappear in a medical crisis, that number carries weight that the dollar figure alone doesn’t capture.
The Fear That the Win Won’t Last
Tommy was careful not to let optimism run ahead of him. When I asked how he felt about where things stood, he gave an answer I’ve been thinking about since. “I feel good about it right now. But I also felt good in September 2023, two weeks before I fell. I know how fast things can change in this work.”
Construction is among the occupations with the highest rates of workplace injuries in the United States, according to data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities program. Tommy is aware of his exposure in a way that office workers rarely have to be.
He mentioned that Deja graduates in May 2026 and has already received a job offer from a hospital system in the Jacksonville area starting at just over $58,000 annually. That second income, he said, is the thing he’s pinning the most hope on — not as a rescue plan, but as breathing room. Room to keep the family contributions going and still build something for himself.
Whether that plays out as hoped will depend on variables Tommy can’t fully control: another injury, a family emergency, the cost of a wedding they’re already starting to plan. He knows this. He said it himself, without prompting. “I’m not naive. I’ve been through enough to know that plans are just plans.”
What Tommy’s Story Reflects Back at All of Us
I’ve covered benefits long enough to know that Tommy Kirby is not an outlier. He is, in many ways, the rule — a working person with a real income who nonetheless fell through every gap that benefits systems create: a disability policy that replaced less than two-thirds of his wages, an early withdrawal penalty that punished him for surviving a crisis, and a family obligation that no spreadsheet fully accounts for.
The 2025 COLA adjustment brought the average Social Security retirement benefit to approximately $1,976 per month, according to the SSA’s 2025 COLA fact sheet. For Tommy, Social Security retirement feels abstract — decades away. But the choices he makes now about savings, about disability coverage, about what gets protected when crisis hits, will directly shape what that eventual benefit means to him.
When we wrapped up the interview, Tommy was heading back to his crew. He’d been on lunch for almost ninety minutes and seemed unbothered by it. Before he hung up, he said something that stuck: “I just want to make sure that the next bad thing that happens doesn’t undo everything. That’s all I’m working toward right now.”
It’s a modest goal. Given everything he’s carrying, it also sounds like exactly the right one.
Sloane Avery Wren is Senior Benefits Writer at Benefit Beat, covering Social Security, disability programs, and retirement policy. If you have a benefits story to share, reach out through our tips page.
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