Paying rent above the standard 30% of your monthly income threshold is commonly considered a cost burden.

According to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 22.4 million households pay more than a third of their income in rent.

12 million of those renters are severely cost burdened, which means they are spending more than 50 % of  their income on housing.

Here is a CNN news story from January 30, 2024

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/30/economy/rent-prices-dropping-2024-apartments/index.html

Believe it or not, it gets worse !

Researchers at the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Boston have developed a valuable but little-known measure of the cost of living for older adults: the Elder Index.

More than half of older women living alone — 54% — are in a precarious financial situation: either poor according to federal poverty standards or with incomes too low to pay for essential expenses. For single men, the share is lower but still surprising — 45%.

The July 2022 article from KFF Health News tells the story of a 81 year old woman living alone in Portland, Maine.

Each month, Fran Seeley, a retired teacher, gets $925 from Social Security and a $287 disbursement from an individual retirement account. To make ends meet, she’s taken out a reverse mortgage on her Portland, Maine, home that yields $400 monthly.

So far, Seeley has been able to live on this income — about $19,300 a year — by carefully monitoring her spending and drawing on limited savings. But should her excellent health worsen or she need assistance at home, Seeley doesn’t know how she’d pay for those expenses.

If you are a loved one are struggling to get by in the US, call us.