The free tax prep clinic at San Antonio’s Eastside Community Center runs every Tuesday through April 15. I was there in late February covering a story on low-income filers navigating the IRS’s new direct file tools when I noticed a woman at a corner table, staring at a single sheet of paper like it had personally wronged her. That was Irene Velasquez.
Irene is 45. She spent 21 years as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service before a degenerative disc condition forced her out in 2023. She lives alone in a modest three-bedroom house on the northeast side of San Antonio — a house she bought when two incomes were paying for it and that now sits entirely on her shoulders, with a monthly mortgage payment of $1,340.
She agreed to speak with me after the clinic volunteer finished her return. We sat at a folding table with bad fluorescent lighting, and she handed me a printout of her January 2026 bank statement. Her Social Security Disability Insurance deposit — the payment she budgets her entire month around — had come in at $1,187. It was supposed to be $1,527.
A Check That Didn’t Add Up
The $340 shortfall didn’t arrive with a letter, a phone call, or a notice in her online SSA account. It just appeared — or rather, didn’t appear — when the deposit hit on January 22. Irene told me she triple-checked her bank app, assuming a processing delay.
January is a complicated month for Social Security recipients. The annual cost-of-living adjustment takes effect, Medicare Part B premiums are recalculated, and SSI timing shifts because January 1 is a federal holiday. According to SSA.gov’s COLA information, the 2026 COLA increase was 2.5 percent — which for Irene should have meant a modest bump, not a cut of this size.
The math pointed to something else entirely. A Medicare Part B premium increase alone wouldn’t account for $340. Irene doesn’t live with family members, so the SSI one-third reduction provision — which the SSA’s spotlight on the one-third reduction rule describes as applicable when someone lives in another person’s household and receives food or shelter from them — didn’t apply to her situation.
Three Months of Phone Tag with the SSA
Irene called the SSA’s national toll-free number the morning of January 25. She waited on hold for 51 minutes. The representative she reached told her a letter had been mailed explaining the adjustment. That letter, as of the day I met her in late February, had never arrived.
She called again in early February. Same answer. She then sent a written inquiry through her local congressman’s constituent services office — a step she says she would never have known to take if a neighbor hadn’t mentioned it.
As Irene explained the timeline to me, what struck me wasn’t frustration — it was the absence of it. She described each failed phone call the way someone describes checking the weather. Flat. Resigned. She told me she’d cried about it exactly once, in December 2023, when her SSDI application was finally approved after 14 months. Since then, she said, she’d run out of emotional capacity for this particular fight.
The Mortgage That Makes Everything Worse
Irene bought her home in 2018 with her then-husband. The mortgage was structured around two incomes — his $52,000 postal salary and hers. The divorce finalized in 2021, and she kept the house. At the time, she planned to refinance once her income stabilized.
That plan collapsed when her back gave out. Her total monthly income today is her SSDI check plus a small Postal Service disability supplement that brings her to roughly $2,100 on a good month. Her mortgage alone is $1,340. Utilities, food, car insurance, and her out-of-pocket Medicare costs take most of the rest.
When January’s check came in $340 short, Irene paid her mortgage and skipped her car insurance payment. She caught it up in February when her tax refund arrived — $618 from the IRS, which she described as “the only thing that went right this year.” She wasn’t eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit given her income structure, but the clinic volunteer identified a small credit she’d missed in prior years.
What the SSA Finally Said — and What It Still Hasn’t
By mid-March, Irene’s congressional contact had gotten a response from the SSA. The agency confirmed an adjustment had been made to her record related to a workers’ compensation offset calculation — a provision that reduces SSDI benefits when a recipient also receives workers’ comp payments. Irene does receive a small workers’ comp payment from a 2021 on-the-job injury: $290 per month.
According to SSA.gov’s benefits information, certain disability payments can reduce SSDI amounts when combined income exceeds 80 percent of a recipient’s pre-disability earnings. The agency told her congressional office the offset had been applied incorrectly in prior months and was corrected in January.
As of the day I spoke with her, Irene had not received official written confirmation of this explanation. She had not been told whether she owed back payments from the allegedly overpaid months. And she had not been able to get anyone on the phone to confirm the new $1,187 figure is, in fact, what she should expect every month going forward.
The Quiet Weight of Financial Survival
Before I left the clinic that afternoon, I asked Irene how she was really doing. She looked at the table for a moment, then said something I keep thinking about.
Irene’s situation is not unique. Thousands of SSDI recipients experience unexplained payment changes each year, particularly when workers’ compensation offsets or Medicare premium adjustments are recalculated. The SSA encourages recipients to create an online My Social Security account to monitor payment history — something Irene said she had tried but abandoned after a verification issue with her phone number.
She’s also been warned by the clinic volunteer to watch out for scammers who exploit exactly this kind of confusion. The SSA’s official scam protection page notes that the agency will never threaten arrest, suspend your Social Security number, or demand payment through social media, email, or text — red flags that bad actors often deploy when people are already anxious about their benefits.
Irene’s case was still unresolved when this story was filed. She is budgeting on $1,187 per month for the foreseeable future — a number she arrived at not through any official notification, but through guesswork and a congressional staffer’s secondhand summary. She plans to stay in her house as long as she can.
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