‘We were so stupid’

By some comparisons, Nancy Koch, a 70-year-old retired psychiatric nurse, counts herself lucky. She had some good jobs over the years. She’s married — for the third time, after two divorces, each of which involved lawyers, the need to set up new households, and a general drain on savings. Her husband, Terry Koch, 69, was a technical writer who worked most recently for a company that makes labels, though his real love is the piano. He’s the improviser; she’s the organizer. She has recovered better than expected from a health scare a decade ago, when back surgery led to unexpected complications. They have an apartment in West Allis, Wis., in a senior living complex that is subsidized through the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit. What they don’t have is any money.

“We were completely not prepared,” she said, for the life they are now living.

A sizable minority of Americans have struggled all their lives with low incomes. But now, millions more who were solidly middle class — like the Kochs — are looking at a financial fall. Half of Americans are at risk of not being able to maintain their standard of living in retirement, according to a Boston College study that was completed before the pandemic hit and potentially made the prospects even worse.

Dozens of factors have contributed to this, most having to do with lack of access to retirement savings plans, unexpected large financial hits, layoffs and declines in health. A study at Stanford University found the baby boomers have, in real terms, about 20% less in savings, 20% lower household wealth and 100% more debt than the generation born during World War II.

Terry and Nancy Koch (pronounced “Cook”) are part of that 40% of retired Americans who have Social Security as their only income. Between them, it comes to about $2,500 a month. Rent for their subsidized two-bedroom apartment, across the street from an abandoned bowling alley, is $975, plus a $20 pet fee for their cat Sam. The rent is about to go up by $30. Premiums for Medicare and supplemental insurance policies cost about $450 a month for the two of them. Beyond Social Security, their retirement savings plans are — totally tapped out. They have no cushion, no nest egg.

Although they are above the official poverty line, their monthly income falls $750 short of the amount that

“constitutes adequacy as opposed to destitution” for Milwaukee county, said Mutchler, whose team at the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging has calculated an “Elder Index” for every county in the nation.

West Allis, just outside Milwaukee, was once the headquarters of the Allis-Chalmers Co., which manufactured industrial machinery, employed 31,000 unionized workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere, supported a solid standard of living for its workers for nearly eight decades, and paid them pensions when they retired. That’s gone.

The Kochs moved there from the leafy suburb of Bay View because of the affordable rent. They have no friends there. Nancy’s adult son lives alone north of Milwaukee.

In Terry Koch’s view, part of the reason they have no money is rooted in the changes that have swept the country, starting with the culture of their own generation, a legacy of the 1960s.

“It was perhaps the first generation to start thinking that we didn’t want to just get jobs to plug in to get our pensions and to, you know, to be a—holes when we were 70 and beat up our kids and then retire and go to Hawaii or something,” he said. “We were a people who said we kind of like to have job satisfaction up front. And so we didn’t think about the long run of things. To not be thinking about the future, to be more of a Zen thing, you know we live [for] today. And it wasn’t pure hedonism. There was some purity. And we’re still very much that way. I would rather be happy today than miserable 25 years from now. And so I made choices based on that rather than on the economics, which, you know, one could argue fairly successfully that I made some pretty stupid decisions.”

His wife Nancy said, laughing, “Yeah, we were so stupid.”

Music is what makes him happy, Terry Koch said. “It’s a heck of a lot more important than making good labels for potato chip bags for 40 years.”

The Kochs met when they both worked at a bank — one of those small local banks that formerly kept the economy going in cities and towns across America. She was the daughter of a Motorola vice president — “money driven,” is how she described him, a man who’d fight with her mother and then buy her a new car, or fur coat. Nancy was a mother and already on her first divorce by the time she was 20. Terry moved around a lot as a boy; he didn’t know his father. Nancy said he was a “juvenile delinquent,” then burst out laughing. “Yeah, I was a long-haired creep,” he countered, deadpan.

Nancy Koch’s second husband was a law student. They couldn’t save any money while he was paying tuition. As soon as he graduated he split.

In 1983, Nancy and Terry married. By the end of that decade the bank had gone south, so both these 40-something college dropouts decided to go back and get their degrees. Student loans made it possible. Nancy studied nursing. Terry studied English and history but soon drifted into computer work.

‘Just ride it out’

After college he got a job at Blue Cross, she landed an entry-level position at a Milwaukee hospital. She was 47. Three years later, he got a well-paying position as a writer for a defense subcontractor in Providence, R.I. For the next seven years, Nancy worked as a nurse at a series of community health centers around Rhode Island. She loved the work, unconditionally. The pay wasn’t bad — about $50,000 — but the benefits were scanty. Terry wasn’t so happy: The Pentagon contract was canceled, and then the bursting of the tech bubble made it impossible to find similar full-time work.

“All my contacts were saying, you know, just ride it out, just ride it out, just ride it out. And eventually I stopped riding,” Terry Koch said. “And then all the people that I had as contacts lost their jobs.”

He took one temporary job after another. By 2007, Nancy Koch had wrecked her back: nursing is a physical profession. They felt they couldn’t afford to stay in New England, so they moved back to Wisconsin, where Nancy had a series of operations on her hip, back and neck.

Terry and Nancy Koch once had a retirement account, though today they can’t agree as to whether it had $10,000 or $20,000 in it. No matter; they cashed it in, paying taxes and the early-withdrawal penalty, and now it’s about gone.

He found a temp job in customer service for a company that made labels. Five years later he was still working there, still a temp.

“We never saved a lot of money,” Nancy Koch said, “because there wasn’t any to save.”

Terry Koch had an operation for kidney stones and was handed a bill for $50,000, he said. “Are you kidding me? I told them I wasn’t going to pay them,” he said. “You know, good luck trying to collect it from me.” Eventually, he said, the hospital gave up.

He managed to get his student loans suspended; Nancy Koch’s were forgiven, because she went into nursing, but she had to count the outstanding balance as income, and pay taxes on it.

As early as he could — when he turned 62 in 2012 — Terry Koch began taking Social Security. There’s a cost to that: his benefit is just under $1,000 a month. “His monthly check is, like, nonexistent,” Nancy said sarcastically. “It doesn’t pay for anything.”

‘Nobody wants a 70-year-old’

If he could have waited he’d be getting considerably more, because the benefit increases 6.75% for every year that it is deferred, up to age 70. Most Americans do not wait that long. The average Social Security benefit is about $1,461 a month.

Nancy Koch has tried to go back to work. “I’m looking, but nobody wants a 70-year-old,” she said. “I’ve applied for a zillion jobs. It’s completely impersonal.” Last year she had a temporary, part-time job at the local public television station arranging its annual auction, and when it ended she was able to collect some unemployment insurance, but that’s over now.

More and more people in their 60s are, like Nancy, staying at work or trying to return to the workforce. Economists argue over the impact this has on younger workers — whether it suppresses wages for all, or blocks chances for advancement, or strengthens the economy. But only about one-quarter of employed Americans work continuously through their 50s and their early 60s in jobs with benefits, according to a study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

“It was surprising bad news,” said Munnell, who conducted the study. Many older workers are being pushed out of old jobs, with benefits, and taking whatever they can find. Or were before the coronavirus hit.

In 2019, the number of employed Americans over the age of 65 grew by more than 700,000, to 10.6 million. That accounted for 36% of the country’s job growth.

Disruption and desperation

But COVID-19 could halt that trend. “If older workers can’t work in high-contact areas,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, who studies aging and employment issues at the New School University in New York, “employers will have to make accommodations for them.” That’s an expense. They’ll have to accept worse working conditions or lower pay — or see those jobs go to younger people, she said.

“We’re going to see a lot of disruption — political and economic,” she said. “There is nothing that will slow down the desperation of older workers.”

People in their 50s and 60s have come to be seen as more vulnerable because of the disease, Munnell said, and those who have lost their jobs this spring will be less attractive to potential employers. “It has just made the prospects more dismal,” she said. “I think they’re going to have a harder time reentering.”

With COVID-19, the Kochs’ lives