AARP The Magazine - March/April 2010

onset of dementia. Lewis could no longer work, leaving him
with a monthly Social Security income of $1,103. Gail’s em-
ployer wouldn’t give her a more flexible schedule to care for
Lewis, so she found another job teaching at a child-care center
that pays only $7.55 an hour—without benefits. Medical bills
quickly ate up the couple’s $40,000 nest egg. Suddenly their
monthly mortgage of almost $1,000 was out of reach. Unable
to sell their home, they let it slip into foreclosure. “We couldn’t
do it anymore,” Gail says. “We just couldn’t do it.”
And so Gail and Lewis moved into a one-bedroom apart-
ment far from their kids and grandkids. She has pawned her
jewelry, and shops at Goodwill for necessities. The couple
has no cable television or long-distance phone service, and
Gail, who is too young to qualify for Medicare, has no major
medical insurance. She has not visited an eye doctor in five
years, even though she suffers from a serious corneal condi-
tion. Yet when the couple applied for food stamps and Med-
icaid, they were told they made too much money to qualify.

Unbelievable as that sounds, the truth is that millions of older Americans confront the same predicament as the

9.7 OF SENIORS OFFICIALLY LIVE IN POVERTY.
—UNI TED STATES CENSUS BUREAU

Halversons. Although their financial situation is dire, according to the federal government they are not poor. That’s because they earn more than the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty threshold of $13,014 for a two-adult household headed by a senior, and more than the $14,570 that the government uses to determine eligibility for a number of its assistance programs. Under the current guidelines just 9.7 percent of Americans 65 and older officially live in poverty, the Census Bureau reported last September. That figure has barely wavered for a decade, even as the recession has nudged the nation’s overall poverty rate above 13 percent.