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Four new types of income will no longer impact eligibility calculations.
Specific sources of income are excluded by federal statute from consideration as income for purposes of determining eligibility for or benefits in a HUD program. On Jan. 31, HUD published a revised list of exclusions, replacing the previously published version by adding four new income exclusions and modifying existing exclusions to specifically identify which sources of income are excluded both from income calculations and asset determinations.
When a household gets a one-time payment such as an inheritance or a settlement award, you must follow special HUD rules for such payments when certifying and recertifying household income. In general, you must treat these payments, known as “lump-sum payments” or “lump-sum receipts,” as part of a household’s assets. But you must count certain types of lump-sum payments as income. And in certain situations, you don’t include lump-sum payments in your calculations at all.
When interviewing households at certifications, you must find out whether they have disposed of or sold, given away, or put in trust assets for less than fair market value within the last two years. If they have, you generally must factor such assets into your calculations for the household even though the household no longer owns the assets.
HUD requires managers to cover a long list of topics during the certification meetings. At these times, it’s important that households bring certain key documents with them to the certification interview. These are documents containing the information you need to process the initial certification or recertification quickly and submit it to HUD on time.
Last month, in Set House Rules on Extended Absences and Abandonment, we discussed what may happen if an entire household leaves your site for an unexplained extended absence. This month, we’ll look at a situation in which an individual member of a household is absent. Oftentimes, these members are absent due to medical reasons.
It’s likely that a number of the households you certify each year include full-time students who are 18 or older. Certifying these households isn’t complicated. But if you don’t know the specific rules on how to handle full-time students’ income, it’s easy to make mistakes. Here’s a brief rundown on how to calculate full-time students’ income correctly.
When certifying or recertifying households, you may encounter household members who get alimony or child support from ex-spouses or their children’s parents, or household members who pay alimony or child support to someone else. You need to know how to handle these payments correctly to calculate a household’s income. If you make a mistake and miscalculate household income, you could end up charging the household too much rent or HUD too much assistance.
Sometimes a household will alert your management office that it now qualifies as elderly. For example, the head of the household may have reached age 62 and the household now wants the additional allowances that elderly households are entitled to. Such requests may take some managers by surprise, leaving them unsure how to respond.
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