When the Month Is Longer Than the Money

When the check comes in, the month feels comfortable for a few days. First, you pay your rent, then the electricity bill. You buy a few groceries to fill the gaps in the fridge and cupboard, and by week three, the month is already starting to outlast the money.

If that's what your month looks like, you've heard all the regular tips about how to make your money last longer. Skip the occasional coffee shop visit, cancel your subscriptions (if you have any left), and do without cable. And of course, the old standby: make a budget and stick to it, as if you haven't been trying that for a very long time.

Jacqueline Chapman, a retired Philadelphia school aide, put the feeling into words when she spoke to an Associated Press reporter in November 2025, during the federal government shutdown. "I feel like I'm living in scary times," she said. "It's not easy to rest when you know you have things to do with limited accounts, limited funds." Ms. Chapman was 74 at the time and relied on a $630 monthly Social Security check to get by. Her federal food aid had stopped, and the help she gets to heat her apartment was at risk too.

The average retired worker received $2,088 from Social Security in September 2026, so Ms. Chapman's check is low by comparison. But the average isn't much either.

The Elder Index, created by University of Massachusetts Boston researchers, calculates how much a single older person who rents and is in good health needs to cover the basics. The 2025 edition puts this at $2,836 a month nationally, so the average Social Security check falls short by about $750.

For many retirees, the monthly check is most of what there is. Social Security's newest count, which uses 2015 data, found that among people 65 and older getting Social Security, 44% of women received at least half of their income from it, and 15% received 90% or more.

So for many people, the month outlasts the money, and the usual answer is to spend less. Yet millions of people don't claim help they qualify for. The National Council on Aging (NCOA), a nonprofit, works with the Urban Institute to count people who've reached their 65th birthday and qualify for help but don't get it.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a food program, which people often refer to as food stamps. Many older people qualify for SNAP. Yet in 2023, only 38% of older people who could collect food stamps were getting them.

The situation is much the same with Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which provides people with very little income or savings with a monthly check. Only 40% of the older people who qualified for it got it. The Medicare Savings Programs cover the Medicare premium for people with low incomes, but only 49% of the older people who qualified got that help. NCOA puts the value of the help left unclaimed in 2023 at about $58 billion.

The Medicare Savings Programs pay the Part B premium, $202.90 a month in 2026, or $2,434.80 a year, for people with low enough income and savings. That is worth more than twice the 2027 Social Security raise on the average check, about $75 a month. Qualifying also brings Extra Help with your drug costs.

For food, people 60 and older living alone who received SNAP got an average of $162 a month in 2023. Our explainer, SNAP for Seniors, goes through who qualifies after 60 and how your medical bills can raise what you receive.

Help like this has always come with rules, and it has always started with someone asking.

Food stamps go all the way back to May 1939, when Rochester, New York, became the first city to try them. A newspaper photo from that week shows Mrs. Delia Mulrooney, 75, studying the rules before collecting her stamps. She'd been on relief for five years.

The next January, Ida May Fuller, a retired Vermont legal secretary, was sent the first monthly Social Security check, for $22.54. It started when she walked into a government office. As she said later, "I knew I'd been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it."

She only had to ask once, and she kept receiving monthly checks until 1975, when she died at 100. Social Security still works that way. You only have to sign up once, and after that, the check comes on its own every month.

Social Security isn't the only check older people can claim. SSI started paying a monthly check to older, blind and disabled people with little income in January 1974. One of its rules has barely moved: a single person can't have more than $2,000 in countable savings, the same limit since 1989.

Public policy scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan have a name for the hard part. They call it administrative burden. It includes the effort required to find out that a program exists, the paperwork and proof needed to apply, and the strain of asking.

Once you sign up for Social Security, it mostly runs itself, because the government already has your work record. You have to prove what you have when applying for most of the other benefits, and sometimes you'll have to prove it again and again.

In a 2004 federal study Herd cites, about half of the people who qualified for SNAP but weren't getting it believed they didn't qualify. Of the people not using SNAP, 40% pointed to the paperwork. Herd wrote, "Given that many older adults remain so economically vulnerable, it is striking that economic resources to which they could tap are being left on the table."

Dillie Nerios spent her days signing older people up for food stamps in Florida. "They're ashamed," she told National Public Radio in 2013. "Most of them think because they get a Social Security check and in some cases just a little over $600, they think I won't qualify."

In The Washington Post, Eli Saslow wrote about one man she met, Lonnie Briglia, 60, who told her, "I don't want to be another person depending on the government." Her response was, "How about being another person getting the help you deserve?" He wasn't ready to sign up. He kept her card.

The economists Amy Finkelstein and Matthew Notowidigdo ran a test in Pennsylvania in 2016 with about 30,000 older people who were likely eligible for SNAP but weren't getting it. They divided them into three groups. The first group heard nothing. The second got a letter telling them they probably qualified. The third got the letter and an offer of help applying.

Over the next nine months, 6% of the first group signed up, compared with 11% of the group that received a letter and 18% of the group that was offered help. The letter almost doubled the number who signed up, and the letter with an offer of help tripled it.

Knowing you might qualify helped. Having someone help you apply helped more.

Robin Gentry was 59 and living in South Philadelphia in 2020, on a Social Security disability check that, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, "never seemed to stretch 31 days." A nonprofit sent her a letter offering to check what she might qualify for. She accepted the help, and started to receive Medicaid, plus $140 a month in food stamps. "Life got very much easier," she said. "The letter was a wonderful thing."

Finding out what you could receive costs nothing, and you don't have to do it alone. Start with BenefitsCheckUp, run by NCOA. It asks a few questions, then gives you a list of what you may qualify for.

For the Medicare Savings Programs, the federal income limits in 2026 run from $1,350 to $1,816 a month for one person, depending on the program, with a savings limit too. Some states allow more, so a check a little above the line doesn't settle it. Your state's SHIP (State Health Insurance Assistance Program) offers free counseling for the Medicare programs and Extra Help, paid for by the federal government, and can help you with the forms, at 1-877-839-2675.

For help closer to home, the Eldercare Locator, at 1-800-677-1116, can point you to local services.

You may have genuine reasons for not applying. The smallest SNAP benefit is $25 a month, and completing the forms takes time.

Some people worry that the state will take their home later. For the Medicare Savings Programs, federal rules since 2010 say the state can't recover what the program paid toward your Medicare costs from your estate, though other Medicaid help can still be recovered.

Many people don't want to depend on others. Most of us prefer to pay our own way. Lonnie Briglia felt that, and he kept Dillie Nerios's card anyway.

One check comes on its own. The others wait to be asked.

Sources

• Associated Press, Susan Haigh and Marc Levy, "Shutdown threatens to delay home heating aid for millions of low-income families" (November 2025), via PBS NewsHour: pbs.org
• Social Security Administration, Monthly Statistical Snapshot, September 2026: ssa.gov
• James Mak, "What It Takes to Age in Place in Hawai'i," UHERO (October 2026), with the 2025 Elder Index from the University of Massachusetts Boston (Table 1, U.S. single renter in good health): uhero.hawaii.edu, and the University of Hawaii News summary: hawaii.edu
• Social Security Administration, Social Security Fact Sheet (shares of income from Social Security, research released in 2024 using 2015 data): ssa.gov (PDF)
• National Council on Aging, "Over 9 Million Eligible Older Adults Are Missing Out on $58 Billion in Benefits" (May 2026): ncoa.org
• Urban Institute for NCOA, "Estimation of National, State, and Substate Program Participation Rates for Adults 65 and Older, 2023" (March 2026): ncoa.org (PDF)
• USDA, "A Short History of SNAP": usda.gov
• Washington Daily News, May 17, 1939, photo of the first Rochester food stamps, Library of Congress: loc.gov
• Social Security Administration History, Ida May Fuller: ssa.gov
• James C. Callison, "Early Experience Under the Supplemental Security Income Program," Social Security Bulletin (June 1974): ssa.gov (PDF)
• Social Security Advisory Board, statement in the 2011 SSI Annual Report (resource limits unchanged since 1989): ssa.gov, and SSA's 2027 cost-of-living fact sheet ($2,000 limit in 2027): ssa.gov
• Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan, "Administrative Burdens in the Social Safety Net," Journal of Economic Perspectives (2025): aeaweb.org
• Pamela Herd, "How Administrative Burdens Are Preventing Access to Critical Income Supports for Older Adults: The Case of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program," Public Policy & Aging Report (2015), citing Bartlett, Burnstein and Hamilton's 2004 study for USDA; copy posted by the Brazilian Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology: sbgg.org.br (PDF)
• NPR, Talk of the Nation, "Signing Up for Food Stamps: The Choice and the Stigma" (April 2013): wamc.org
• Eli Saslow, "In Florida, a food-stamp recruiter faces would-be recipients' wrenching choices," The Washington Post (April 2013), on Lonnie Briglia, from his Pulitzer Prize entry: pulitzer.org
• Amy Finkelstein and Matthew J. Notowidigdo, "Take-up and Targeting: Experimental Evidence from SNAP," National Bureau of Economic Research (2018; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019): nber.org
• Alfred Lubrano, The Philadelphia Inquirer (October 2020), on Robin Gentry and Benefits Data Trust: inquirer.com
• CMS, "2026 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles" (November 2025): cms.gov
• Social Security Administration, press release on the 3.6% raise for 2027 (October 2026): ssa.gov
• Medicare.gov, Medicare Savings Programs (2026 limits, and Extra Help): medicare.gov
• USDA Food and Nutrition Service, Characteristics of SNAP Households: Fiscal Year 2023 (average benefit for older people living alone): usda.gov (PDF), and the SNAP cost-of-living memo for 2027 ($25 minimum): usda.gov (PDF)
• CMS, State Medicaid Director Letter 10-003 (February 2010), on estate recovery and the Medicare Savings Programs: cms.gov (PDF)
• BenefitsCheckUp (NCOA): benefitscheckup.org; SHIP: shiphelp.org; Eldercare Locator: eldercare.acl.gov
• Arcanomy calculation: the gap between $2,836 and $2,088.79; $202.90 times 12; the 2027 raise compared with the premium; 11% and 18% against 6%; and the chart's shares.