Records seen by Business Insider show that the Massachusetts-based single mom of two made about $55,000 last year from one full-time job and two part-time jobs. She said it wasn’t even close to enough, though.
“Every month is a struggle to make sure all the bills are paid—there’s never enough for savings,” she told BI in an email before. The bills she was talking about were her car loan, insurance, rent, and food. “It is frustrating and exhausting, mentally and physically,” Sarah asked to use a fake name so that her ex-partner, who she said was cruel, wouldn’t be able to find out who she was.
She knows of a few government programs that could help her, but there’s a catch: Sarah said she doesn’t qualify for many of them because her income is too high.
Sarah said she has been eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and MassHealth in the past. MassHealth helps needy Massachusetts residents get free or low-cost health care. She makes more than the highest amount of money before taxes that she needs to get MassHealth, which is $34,341.
She is still eligible for a rental voucher program that helps pay some of her rent, but she said that living still costs her about 40% of her monthly income. Another thing she said was that she was “dangerously close” to losing this rental assistance because her income was too high. In Massachusetts, the requirements for eligibility varies by city.
“The poverty limit is light years away from reality,” she said. It costs $31,200 a year to live in poverty for a family of four, or $15,060 for a single person.
Sarah is in a place where no one can go, and she’s not the only one. United Way, a nonprofit group, says that in 2021, about 13% of people in the US lived in poverty. But another 29% were what United Ways calls an ALICE, which stands for “asset limited, income constrained, employed.”
Americans who are having a hard time paying their bills but may make too much to get government help like SNAP, rental assistance, or Medicaid are called ALICEs. Some ALICEs have had a hard time with the rising costs of living over the past few years because they don’t get any help from the government to boost their incomes.
The most current data from the Census Bureau, which shows the poverty rate as of 2022, shows that the number of poor Americans is close to the lowest it has been in decades. The jobless rate is still low, wages are going up even when you take inflation into account, and Americans of all income levels have become much richer in the last few years.
But not every American is doing well, not even those who have managed to stay above the poverty line.
“There’s never enough for savings”
She worked one overnight shift a week last year, among other things, to make money for her family, Sarah said. But most of the time, there isn’t much money left over after paying the bills.
“There’s never enough for savings, let alone emergencies or even taking the kids out to a proper restaurant,” she stated.
She has put her name on several waiting lists for cheap housing programs, but most of them have five to ten-year wait times. She still gets help with living, which is nice, but she said she still doesn’t have enough money to buy a bed.
“I have been sleeping on a couch and surviving off of a food pantry and creative means — like utilizing friends with various store discounts and almost exclusively wearing used clothing,” she shared.
It would be great if more was done to help people like her.
“The housing crisis must be attended to immediately,” she told us. “Food stamp guidelines and other social safety net programs need an overhaul because the current system is flawed and outdated.”
