These 7 Americans Depend on Their Social Security Payments — and Fear Losing Them

Marshall closed her fledgling consulting firm and returned home to Maryland. She became legal guardian for her mother and aunt. She found her mother’s finances in disarray, declared bankruptcy for her mom and devoted her life to full-time caregiving.

Her healthy 401(k), her mother’s government pension and her aunt’s disability income allowed them to live together in Marshall’s townhouse near Fort Meade. But 14 years of caregiving depleted her savings.

At age 56, she tried to get another information technology job, but recruiters said her skills were out-of-date. 

“They wanted more certification,” says Marshall, who couldn’t afford the $23,000 for additional training. Instead, she found work as a receptionist for a consulting company at much lower pay.

She stayed until 65, then sold her townhouse and built a house on her family’s land to be near her cousins, about 30 miles south of Washington, D.C. After her mortgage, construction loans, insurance, utilities and prescriptions, Marshall says, she’s usually left with $240 for groceries and gas but sometimes has surprise expenses.

Last month, her doctor changed her diabetes medicine. The cost increased by $70, and after paying for all her medications, she had $95 remaining.

At age 66, Marshall is looking for part-time work. At job fairs she sees plenty of people her age, creating a lot of competition in her rural county.

“At my age, where I think I should have two or three incomes, all my income is just Social Security,” she says. “So it’s kind of sad and depressing sometimes.”

She wants to work as a home health aide, saying her passion is caregiving. She has two godchildren who will help take care of her one day but worries that without Social Security she would lose her independence and her house.

“It’s my biggest fear that I’m not going to have any money left and I’m going to live in a shelter,” Marshall says. “I don’t mean a homeless shelter. I mean a lean-to!”

Entrepreneur had no time or energy left to rebuild

Carolyn Antell, 77, Golden, Colorado

• Career: Former interior designer
• Retirement: 62
• Monthly income: $1,100 from Social Security

Carolyn Antell’s interior design business couldn’t survive the 2008–09 Great Recession, and at 62 she didn’t have time to wait for a rebound.

“There were a lot of tears, and there was a lot of realization that ‘Honey, you’re going to have to live on your Social Security,’ ” says Antell, who estimates she furnished about 700 weekend and vacation homes in New Hampshire and Colorado over her 40-year career.

She’d weathered previous economic downturns in her 30s and 40s, divorced two husbands and raised three children. In the beginning, Carolyn supplemented her then-$800 monthly check by applying for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and holding down six part-time jobs, including walking dogs, watering lawns and working at a Lane Bryant clothing store.

As a second career, she went back to school, earned certified nursing assistant credentials and started a private care company helping older adults. After four years on a waiting list, she was able to move into subsidized housing.

The rent and utilities for her 560-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment about 12 miles west of Denver is set at 30 percent of her income. The building is drafty in winter and can reach 90 degrees in summer, but Antell says she’s grateful to have a home she can afford.

Her fixed rent and Social Security allow her to pay for a mobile phone, cat food and repairs to her 2009 Subaru.

Spinal stenosis, which can pinch the spinal cord and nerves that branch from it, means she now uses a walker to get down to the river a block from her building and to a community center next door. She likes to drive to a nearby reservoir to watch bald eagles raise their young.

“A lot of people don’t even understand how Social Security began or [how it] works. Every paycheck you’ve ever made since you started working is … taxed for it,” Antell says.

In the past four months, Antell says, she’s been bombarded with stories about the SSA — staff cuts at field offices, phone identification being taken away, then rolled back.

“We hear they’re going to cut back, but we don’t know how much,” she says. “I can’t take the level of fear.”

She wants her friends and her state’s representatives to know how crucial it is to people like her who can’t work enough to afford rent on their own. Antell estimates she makes about 25 calls a day.

“I’m at war,” she says. “This is a battle, and it is exhausting.”

Social Security allows a spouse to focus on caregiving

Suzanne, 79, and Susan Leedy, 76, McGaheysville, Virginia

• Careers: Former real estate agent, registered nurse
• Retirement: 62 and 58
• Monthly income: $4,800 from Social Security

In 2011, partners Suzanne and Susan Leedy needed to rethink their lives.

Susan, then 58, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and could no longer work as a nurse but could get Social Security disability benefits. Suzanne, a real estate agent, wanted to retire and at 62 could collect her Social Security retirement.

Most of their savings had gone to medications. One alone cost $1,700 a month.

Move saves money. So they sold their house in Alexandria, Virginia, across the river from Washington, D.C., and found a less expensive community in the Shenandoah Valley about 100 miles southwest, where their combined income of $4,800 a month, supplemented with money from Suzanne’s part-time job renting time-shares, would give them a comfortable life.

Then, in December 2020 as Susan was recovering from knee replacement surgery, she had a stroke. A dementia diagnosis soon followed.

To care for her wife at home, Suzanne needed to become a full-time caregiver.

“Fortunately, our house is paid for. We couldn’t do it if that weren’t the case,” Suzanne says. Though the two, married for more than 10 years and together for 35 years, depend entirely on Social Security, Suzanne isn’t worried that income will disappear.

Inaction will cost money. If Congress doesn’t fix the problem, the Social Security trust funds are projected to run out of money by 2034. The Social Security Board of Trustees estimated this year that the program will be able to pay 81 percent of scheduled benefits if that happens.

But the trust fund shortfall is easy to solve, Suzanne says.

“All they have to do is eliminate the cap,” she says. “If they just did that one thing, there would be plenty of money.” In 2025, earnings up to $176,100 are subject to Social Security tax. People pay Medicare tax on all their earnings.

Suzanne, who calls herself a natural optimist, believes that lawmakers will keep Social Security going at 100 percent.

“We’ve been through trouble before, and we’ve made it out on the other side,” she says, remembering the 1983 law that gradually raised the full retirement age from 65 to 67 over a 22-year period. “I feel certain we’re going to all come together at some point.”

The pandemic derailed his retirement plans

Robbie Dickson, 66, Mobile, Alabama

• Career: Former chef
• Retirement: 62
• Monthly income: $1,135 from Social Security, $1,100 from part-time work

Robbie Dixon was a chef at a boutique hotel in Mobile, Alabama, when COVID-19 caused the hospitality business to collapse.

“All of a sudden, my world got turned upside down,” says Dickson, who had just turned 62 but planned to keep working until 70. “Thank goodness my Social Security was there.”

He applied as soon as he was laid off. He lived on his savings until he received his first check. That monthly $1,135 covers Medicare Part B, rent and utilities. To pay for groceries and other expenses, he works a few hours a week as a maître d’ at a seafood restaurant.

Thrift is a way of life. Now, instead of hopping 150 miles over to New Orleans to visit friends, entertaining a couple of nights a week and shopping at specialty food stores, he looks for buy-one-get-one-free deals, conserves gas by consolidating errands in one trip and relies on free events like the Gulf Coast Shrimp Festival. Recently, he and a fellow retired chef pooled beef scraps to make their own hamburger meat.

Last year, he found his financial situation precarious as he healed from a hernia operation. Without his part-time job, he had to rely on a food bank and talk to his landlord and utility companies about paying late.

“It was hard to let people see me live like that,” he says. “It takes very little time to fall behind.”

No big emergency fund. While he still has some savings, without Social Security he doesn’t know if he would be able to support himself. Chefs are on their feet all day, and although his doctors say he’s healthy for his age, he worries about his body and potential cuts or elimination of the program.

“I’d have to start selling all my belongings,” he says. “I really don’t know where I would go. Hopefully, I’ll never have to get to that point.”

He has lived in his apartment for 43 years and doesn’t want to move to subsidized housing.

“For a lot of people, this is all they depend on, and they’ve paid into it. I mean, it’s their money,” Dickson says. “Those people that are trying to cut the Social Security, … they’ve never walked in our shoes before.”