A thread about acting on behalf of the dead. My Aunt and Uncle died within a few months of each other in late 2025 and early 26. I learned that if a surviving spouse does not call in to get the modest death benefit, and passes away, the funds do not go to the estate of the couple. Small amount of money, but that was interesting to learn. TIP: If your married older family members are both frail and one dies, don't relax and take your time. Act swiftly to help claim that benefit. But there was also another complication... I need to file taxes for them for last year. I have his Social Security 1099 form, but not hers. I am the trustee for their California revocable Trust, so I have to settle everything. I don't have her account password info to log in and get the dollar amount for her for 2025, and I don't have her phone anymore which has made logging into ANY accounts problematic. How do I proceed?

Hello fellow navigators of complexity! I'm reposting this from the weekly thread with some additional facts, because I am possibly too nervous about doing the wrong thing, and there are a lot of details - maybe extraneous - that are making me cautious about how to fix this situation. My 95 year old mom apparently got a check for about three thousand dollars from Soc Sec last year after years of being on teacher retirement. She also got some smaller checks, until at some point my sister got her automatic deposits set up to get a few hundred a month directly. Later, when we did her taxes we tried to log in to see what she got and could not. I called, and was able to get a total dollar amount to use on the tax form. It was a lot bigger, and that made me thing that some big check was never deposited into her account. (Either it was lost in her chaotic house or it went to somebody else?) I checked her bank records, but I couldn't get itemized payment info from SSA because we could not get in to her ID.me login. On that first call the kind SSA person told me to apply for a new card, but didn't give me enough information to make me sure that made sense. I just wanted to get the ID.me login working again. After a second call, another helpful SSA person said that since she's so old it might be safer to touch nothing, because something was wrong. He then revealed to me that even though ID.me accepts a US passport card (not the same as a normal passport booklet) as ID, when the system scanned her card, the way the line breaks on the name created a new name for her in her SSA account with just her first and middle (or maiden) name. The person on the phone said to ignore it - let her be Firstname Middlename from her on out. (She does not want to be known by her maiden name, by the way.) But I still want the records. There's missing money that she needs! I tried to make a local appointment and was able to go in to the offices (on vacation in Medford, Oregon). The agent suggested I fill out forms to take over receiving benefits for her under Firstname Middlename. The forms would have to be signed by my mom as Firstname MIddlename, despite her objections.

Hello everyone, Dr. Ed here. Got a question? Ask here! I will answer a lot of these questions in the next LIVE Q&A! 3pmPT/6pmET on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MyGovExpert Make sure your subscribed to my YouTube channel too!! Made a fresh new one, and will make a fresh new one every week or so.

I applied for Social Security retirement today & as expected, my interviewer wasn’t familiar with a program for divorced spouses with disabled adult children. I tried checking the mygovexpert website so I could find the program’s name for her, but every link on Google redirects here. I desperately need to find Ed’s original website, because the program’s name is definitely there. The page I’m looking for even has a Pro Tip I gave Ed during a live video session. 😂 I have notes somewhere, but they’re buried somewhere in my hoarder’s heaven of a bedroom (thank you, aging body, for keeping me practically confined in here for nearly 2 years…ugh). Any help getting to the original website is much appreciated!