I hope some of you out there reading this received a fully favorable decision before their wintertime holiday, whatever that particular holiday is for you. As I have explained before, this is normally a very slow time of year as far as getting Social Security disability decisions and VA decisions, due to the holidays and people taking vacation time and sick days. The good news is that, normally after we get through the holiday season the Social Security Administration and Veterans Administration seem to pick up their pace considerably. I have found in my practice, that January, February and March can be some of the busiest months of the year in terms of getting disability decisions. I hope this is the case for those of you who did not receive a decision before the holidays. I know this time of year can be particularly difficult for those applying for Social Security disability or VA disability benefits. Do your best to put your disability claims out of your mind and enjoy the holiday season and your families. I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy holiday and hope that the new year brings with it many favorable decisions to all of you. This is a time for family and friends and to be thankful for the good things in our lives, and I hope you are able to put the worry and stress of your disability claims behind you, for at least this short period of time. I would also like to thank all of our military members who were not able to be home with their families during the holidays and may God keep them safe and bring them home soon to their families.

I have recently added a new page on Social Security disability in Mississippi. With the addition of this page, I now have information on Social Security disability and individual states for 38 states. I will continue to add the rest of the states with information about SSDI and SSI for individual states until I have all the states completed. I have also added new information to my Ohio state page which includes a recent hearing on the incredibly long backlogs in that state at the SSD hearing level. I also added the two new hearing offices which were opened in that state to address the huge backlogs in OH. It is my plan within the next couple of days to be adding quite a bit a new information to help you understand the SSDI and SSI process, and it will include more pages on particular medical conditions and how they are handled by Social Security disability. I also plan to add a page which I think many of you will find of particular interest. This page will contain information about how Social Security is now handling dire need cases and how it has become more difficult to have your case sped up based on dire need. It will include who is eligible to have their cases moved along quicker and what the requirements are to do so. I will also be adding more information on how the Social Security Administration is presently handling veterans claims for Social Security disability. This should keep me quite busy for the next week or two as I attempt to provide you with more and more free information on Social Security disability. I hope you find all of this new content to be helpful in both understanding Social Security system and helping you win your Social Security disability case.

For those of you who follow this Social Security disability informational website, you probably noticed I recently changed the look and navigation of the Ultimate Disability Guide. This was an experiment that did not work out as I hoped it would. Although the new website was a much nicer looking website it dropped in the search engines dramatically. I decided it was more important that my free information on Social Security disability and VA disability be seen by more people than for the site to look more attractive. I hope this has not caused any confusion to any of you who follow my website and I can assure you that all the content is the same, and I will continue to add new content to help you understand the SSDI, SSI, and VA disability process. This website is still the best resource for disability information on the web, but unfortunately you and I will have to deal with the older somewhat uglier look of the website. I did my best to provide a new updated look but for whatever reason I was reaching less people who need help with their Social Security disability claims. Keep coming back to my website as I will continue to provide more and more free helpful information.  For all the disabled looking for help to give themselves the best chance to win their disability claim, you will still find all the great free disability information I provide as I always have and as I will continue to do.