My Support Forums - View Single Post - Bipolar Check-in #74

Mountainbard · Mar 24, 2023, 12:32 PM

Doin' the happy dance today, everyone! I have no retirement save Social Security, since I was unemployed for the majority of my bipolar life. My wife has a pension and her Social Security coming, and she's eligible for both right now. But she is also severely depressed, and had not done what she needed to do in order to get those monies coming in. We started keeping our finances separate in the wake of an outrageous spending binge on my part in about 1995, and I've honored that, and not pried into her finances, since. But we couldn't pay this month's rent, let alone April's. Her credit cards were maxed. I finally got her to get the paperwork done for her pension, and we got that mailed out yesterday. She also called the local Social Security office, since she'd been waiting for two months without word on her SS. She got very prompt action!

She called them yesterday, and while I was running errands this morning, they called back. My wife will start getting her SS in May, and her "catch-up" money amounted to a very nice sum, enough to totally relieve the financial pressure on us. We're boomers, of course, and like so many in our generation, we made no provision and did no planning for our "golden years." We didn't have kids, and have very few immediate family still living.

Now I just have to watch myself and make sure I don't go hypomanic. We've gone through a lot of health issues (and so, of course, money) in the past five years. This is truly a red-letter day, and one of the best and happiest I remember in a long while. So I really wanted to share it with my MSF bipolar brethren and sistren. Life is good.