Have you ever done the math on what you are quietly giving away — not to a bad investment or a frivolous expense, but to someone you love, because no one else will?
When I sat down with Monique Washington at a diner on Harford Road in Baltimore on a Tuesday morning in March, she was still in her work clothes. She had just finished a six-hour shift and had two hours before she needed to pick up her brother Marcus from his day program. She ordered coffee, black, and she did not look like someone who felt sorry for herself. That made her story harder to hear.
A Brother’s Accident, a Family’s Unraveling
Monique Washington is 43 years old and has worked for UPS for fourteen years. She earns approximately $42 per hour under her Teamsters contract — solid, stable, the kind of income her parents dreamed she would have. But the income tells only part of the story.
Her brother Marcus was 25 when a car accident left him with a traumatic brain injury and partial paralysis. Monique was 26 at the time. Their mother died four years after the accident; their father followed two years later. What had been a shared caregiving arrangement became entirely hers.
Marcus receives Social Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI. In 2025, the average monthly SSDI payment was approximately $1,580, according to Fox Business Social Security coverage. For many recipients, that number barely covers housing, let alone the supplemental needs that come with complex disability.
Monique told me she spends somewhere between $600 and $900 each month on expenses that Marcus’s SSDI and Medicaid do not cover: accessible transportation for medical appointments, specialized adaptive equipment, over-the-counter medical supplies, and occasional respite aides when her shifts run long. “Medicaid covers a lot,” she said. “But it doesn’t cover everything. And everything is what he needs.”
The Retirement Account She Stopped Funding
This is the part of Monique’s story that caught me off guard. She is not struggling to pay rent. She is not choosing between groceries and prescriptions. By most external measures, she looks fine. That invisibility, she said, is its own kind of exhaustion.
Monique told me she stopped contributing to her UPS pension supplement — a voluntary 401(k)-style account available through her union — approximately six years ago. The math was simple and brutal: after rent, Marcus’s gap expenses, her own health costs, and basic household bills, there was nothing left to set aside.
Six years of $200 monthly contributions — roughly $14,400 in principal alone, not accounting for any market growth — sitting as a blank line in a retirement account that was never opened. For a 43-year-old with no other retirement savings, that gap compounds quietly with each passing year.
She has not taken a real vacation in six years, either. She cannot change shifts because her current schedule aligns with Marcus’s day program hours. She cannot relocate for a promotion she was offered two years ago. “I didn’t even tell my supervisor why,” she said. “What was I going to say?”
What SSDI Covers — and Where It Ends
Understanding Monique’s situation requires understanding the architecture of Marcus’s benefits. SSDI is funded through payroll taxes and is available to workers who become disabled before reaching retirement age, provided they have sufficient work history. Marcus qualified based on his employment record prior to the accident.
Medicaid, which most SSDI recipients become eligible for after a 24-month waiting period, covers a broad range of medical services. But coverage has meaningful gaps, particularly for:
- Non-emergency medical transportation beyond basic parameters
- Adaptive equipment not classified as durable medical equipment under state guidelines
- Personal care hours above what the state waiver program allots
- Over-the-counter supplies and consumables
Monique has navigated every waiver program available in Maryland, she told me. She knows the Medicaid waiver waitlists. She has called the Social Security Administration multiple times about whether Marcus’s benefit amount can be reviewed. She described the process of appealing for additional support as “a second job that doesn’t pay.”
The Bigger Debate Happening Around Her
While Monique navigates the ground-level reality of what Social Security does and does not provide, a much larger debate is playing out at the policy level — one that she knows almost nothing about and, when I described it to her, responded to with quiet skepticism.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has publicly called for Social Security reform, arguing that the program’s pay-as-you-go structure prevents most Americans from building wealth that grows with the market. According to Fox Business reporting on Fink’s proposal, he has suggested allowing a portion of Social Security funds to be invested in diversified assets rather than held exclusively in government bonds — a structural change that proponents argue could strengthen long-term solvency.
The Social Security trust funds, under current projections, face a depletion timeline that has been debated for years. Any reform proposal — whether investment-based or otherwise — lives in the domain of long-term policy. For Monique, the immediate concern is not the trust fund’s 2030s outlook. It is next month’s co-pay for Marcus’s neurologist.
The gap between policy debate and lived experience is not new. But talking with Monique made it unusually concrete. Proposals about market investment of trust fund assets address one dimension of Social Security’s structural future. They do not address the supplemental care gap that informal family caregivers like Monique absorb at personal cost — a cost measured not just in dollars but in retirement savings never started, careers never advanced, vacations never taken.
What She Hopes For — and What She Has Made Peace With
I asked Monique what she would do if she received an unexpected windfall — not a fantasy amount, just something modest, $10,000. She did not hesitate. She said she would fund six months of a respite aide for Marcus and put the rest toward his accessible van, which needs a new lift mechanism.
She did not mention herself until I asked again directly. “Maybe I’d put a little in savings,” she said, with the tone of someone describing something that belonged to another person’s life.
As Monique explained it, she has not made peace with the situation so much as she has made decisions within it. She knows Marcus’s SSDI will continue as long as he remains disabled and does not exceed the Substantial Gainful Activity threshold — currently $1,620 per month for non-blind individuals in 2025. She knows her own Social Security benefit, when she reaches retirement age, will reflect her earnings record and nothing else. The years of unpaid caregiving labor will not appear anywhere in that calculation.
When I left the diner, Monique was pulling on her jacket and checking the time on her phone. She had eighteen minutes to get to Marcus’s program before they closed for the day. She tipped well, thanked me for listening, and walked quickly to her car. I watched her go and thought about how much of the country’s caregiving infrastructure runs on exactly this: someone moving fast, without enough time, without enough support, without anyone watching.
The policy debates about Social Security’s long-term solvency are real and they matter. But the gap Monique fills every month with her own wages is also real, and it does not appear in any trust fund projection or reform proposal I have read. It is just there, absorbed quietly by someone who has decided, without ever being asked, that this is her job now.
Related: The 2026 Social Security COLA Added 2.8% to Your Check — So Why Are Millions Still $180 Short?
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