Hey veterans.
Here's another video on veterans' disability, and TDIU benefits in particular.
If you saw my earlier video, I was discussing the one disability requirement to meet the
minimum thresholds for TDIU benefits.
And again, that's where you have to have one disability rated at 60 or greater, or an overall
rating of 70 or more, with one of those in that 70 being at 40% or greater.
And we were talking about some scenarios where if you have disabilities that are related
for one reason or another, you may actually be able to combine those together into essentially
one disability for purposes of TDIU.
And one way in the regulations they allow for that is if you have extremity ratings.
Which again, extremities are your arms or your legs.
So let's run through an example to make that a little bit more clear for you.
If you have a rating on your right arm of 20%, and you have a rating of 20% on the left
arm, then at first blush you wouldn't meet that 40% requirement.
Looking at that one in particular.
You wouldn't have 40%.
You would have 20 here and 20 there.
But again, those are two disabilities, right?
Well, what the regulations say is if you have two paired extremities, each with a rating,
you can combined those together.
So there your 20% and 20% combined together to be 40%.
So same thing with the legs, again.
20 on one leg and 20 on the other, or 30 on one leg and 10 on the other.
Those get combined together to be a single 40% disability.
Another example, or another way that you can do this, is let's just use one extremity in
particular.
Let's say you have a shoulder rating on the left arm, and then you have a left elbow and
left wrist rating as well.
Now those are three separate disabilities, but they all affect the same extremity.
And this can be one extremity or both extremities.
So in that scenario you would combined the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist rating.
And if those combined to be either 60%, or 40%, then that would meet your test there
for the one disability.
Now, one thing to keep in mind - You can't combine an arm rating with a leg rating.
Because again, it has to be either on the same extremity or the paired, opposite, extremity;
the same body part just on the opposite side of the body.
Also another thing to keep in mind if you're cutting it close on the rating itself, the
bilateral factor does get applied here.
So if you have both arms, then you would take those two, and the bilateral factor, and then
see if it meets that 60%, or 40%.
Again, you can watch other videos we have on the bilateral factor, or read more about
that on our website as well.
But again, if you have disabilities, don't automatically take VA's word for it that they
don't meet that 60% or 40%.
Dig deeper.
See if they can be combined and be considered as one disability to get you past those minimum
thresholds.
And then you enter into territory of proving general unemployability concepts at that point.
But VA may not look at it closely enough, and may just say, "Oh, you don't even qualify
to begin with because you don't meet the schedular requirements."
I hope that helps.
I hope it makes sense.
It gets a little tricky, a little complicated.
If you do have any questions, reach out to us on our website winyourvetclaim.com.
We'll have information about this, about TDIU in general, about the bilateral factor and
other things.
Hopefully all that will be helpful to you.
If you still need help, or if you've been denied in a scenario like this, or on any
sort of TDIU claim, reach out to us.
Again, winyourvetclaim.com and you can get a free consultation there.
Thanks for watching this one.
I'm still going to have some more on the other scenarios.
Remember there was five scenarios where ratings can be combined into one rating, and I'm going
to run through some of those others in upcoming videos.
So stay tuned for those as well.
Thanks.
Have a great day.