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More Maine Seniors Are Being Pushed Into Poverty

Robyn Rosser, in her apartment in Lewiston
Jay Field/MPBN

LEWISTON, Maine — Seniors are typically the least likely age group to be chronically poor, under the federal government's official formula for measuring poverty.
 

But a recent study, by researchers from the University of New Hampshire, found that increasing numbers of Maine seniors are being pushed into poverty by rising medical and cost of living expenses.

The situation is especially perilous for those entering older age without any savings.

In the final part of our series on poverty in Maine, the story of a woman in Lewiston, struggling to survive on social security, after a long-term disability forced her to stop working.
 

"This will take me a minute. There's wifi in the building and it doesn't always work well," says Robyn Rosser, who is trying to log into her bank account on her labtop.

It's early November and we're inside Rosser's small, subsidized apartment at Bates Mill, the refurbished, former textile factory in Lewiston. The days immediately after Rosser gets her monthly social security check are the most agonizing. The money comes in on the third — $1,362 that's supposed to last the entire month. Rosser's account comes up on the screen.

Jay Field: "Today's the 6th." Robyn Rosser: "I have a lot more than I thought I did. $1,032."

Rosser's electric and car insurance bills have been paid. But her $500 rent check still needs to clear. When that happens, she estimates she'll have around $300 for food and other bills for the rest of the month.

"Try not to spend anymore than you have. You get into the laundry money," Rosser says. "You go through your car to get the change."

It's a level of chronic desperation that Rosser could hardly imagine, growing up in an affluent family in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. Rosser says her dad was an advertising executive.

"I was taught all about money when I was younger," she says. "How to invest it. How to save it. My father made me get a checking account when I was 15 and learn how to use it. And, you know, you get an education, you get a job, and everything is going to be okay."

And for a long time, things were okay. Rosser worked for years in creative services at a TV station. She bought a small house on a lake — a nest egg that she hoped would be there for her, when she retired. She had a daughter.

"Child went to good schools," Rosser says. "And them I was disabled, due to unfortunate genetics, at age 49."

Rosser was diagnosed with a serious mental illness and was advised not to work. She says she'd started saving for retirement during the latter part of her career. She used that money up during her first year out of work. Rosser applied for social security disability benefits. And for the next fifteen years or so, she lived primarily off those benefits and the equity in her house.

"I was using my house for a bank account," she says. "The equity in the house was a good thing. I hated to have to give it up that way."

Along the way, Rosser was diagnosed with another serious health condition, a lung disease that requires her to be on oxygen and pay for air conditioning round the clock during the summer, which pushes her electric bill as high as $180 a month. A little less than three years ago, Rosser decided time had come to sell her house. She had debts to pay off and her lung condition was making it difficult to continue going up and down flights of stairs.

In recent years, roughly 9% percent of seniors in Maine have been living below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census. But research out of the University of New Hampshire suggests that the census may be underreporting the number of seniors who are struggling.

"We looked at a different measure of poverty," said Mary Beth Mattingly, Director of Research on Vulnerable Families at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey School of Public Policy.

Back in September, Mattingly and a colleague used the so-called supplemental poverty index to measure the number of vulnerable seniors in Maine. The supplemental measure factors in such things as medical costs, housing and other cost of living expenses.

"There was this two fold difference, this new measure that adjusted for the cost of housing, and took into account those medical costs, showed that a higher share of Maine seniors were poor than revealed by the official poverty measure," Mattingly says.

Robyn Rosser says friends have been generous, lending her both financial and moral support, as she faces her increasingly limited resources and options. But she's still angry, she says, over the place she's ended up in.

"Everybody is angry," Rosser says. "And especially me. A lot. I don't feel I did anything wrong and I feel like I'm being punished all the time."

Rosser says she's noticed KL more and more people are talking down to her because she's poor. She says she's not used to it and is still taken aback when it happens.