Anxious older adults try coping with limited budgets
Economic insecurity is upending the lives of millions of older adults as soaring housing costs and inflation diminish the value of fixed incomes.
Across the country, seniors who until recently successfully managed limited budgets are growing more anxious and distressed. Some lost work during the coronavirus pandemic. Others are encountering unaffordable rent increases and the prospect of losing their homes. Still others are suffering significant sticker shock at grocery stores.
Beyond anecdotal evidence, the Elder Index, a tool developed by researchers at the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, suggests that 54% of older women who live alone have incomes below what's needed to pay for essential expenses. For single men, the figure is 45%.
Three women recently shared highly personal details of their lives to help illustrate how unexpected circumstances — the pandemic and its economic aftereffects, natural disasters, and domestic abuse — can result in unanticipated precarity in later life, even for people who worked hard for decades.
These are their stories.
Bettye Cohen
Cohen, 79, has been distraught since learning that the owners of her Towson, Maryland, apartment complex are raising rents precipitously as they upgrade units.
She currently pays $989 monthly for a one-bedroom apartment with a terrace. A similar apartment that has been redone recently went on the market for $1,900.
“After 33 years living in my apartment, I will have to move,” she said, “since the new owners of the building are renovating all apartments and charging rents of over $1,800 to $2,500 a month, which I cannot afford.”
This is a national trend affecting all age groups: As landlords respond to high demand, rent hikes this year have reached 9.2%.
Cohen has been told