<prompt> Human: So I will try to explain this to the best of my ability, but my subject knowledge is limited. Here is the deal, my wife is bipolar. About 10 years ago she had a rather large episode that eventually lead to her diagnosis, treatment, and a social security disability check each month. After about 10-15 years of experience with her illness my wife has learned to cope rather well with bipolar, however she still cant work a regular day job. She struggles with it and we will just leave it at that. Anyway, over the last couple of years she has found a good balance as a real estate agent. In any event, at some point in the last couple of years, based on a social security case review they have determined she made slightly too much money to have been getting paid social security. The problem is, the rules surrounding social security are not black and white and are not easy to understand. To complicate things further, real estate being a commission based self-employment makes it difficult to project income. So after a year of her making too much money in total, they continued to send checks. Well now they have stopped her social security payments understandably so and want that money back to the tune of about 40k.After losing the social security income, we are barely scraping by. We had about 5-7k in the bank, but our mortgage and other bills have eaten away at that over the last 5-6 months. I dont care at all about receiving the social security check. In fact I love that shewe dont depend on it anymore, but we cant afford to pay 40k back, period. Frankly, it irritates me that they would just keep sending checks instead of stopping it earlier. If it seems like I am somewhat distant or lacking in knowledge on this subject, its because I am. The social security thing has always been hers to deal with, and I just didnt feel the need to pry into that.Heres where we are so far: We both appealed the decision to have social security payments stopped and asked for a waiver with regard to the owed money based on an attorneys advice, both of which were denied.  <response>: Unfortunately, your wife was required to report to the SSA that her income had changed. Her failure to do so caused overpayments. 