Roughly 40 percent of Americans say Social Security will be their primary — or only — source of retirement income, according to Social Security Administration research. For millions of working-class households, that projection is not a choice. It is a default — shaped by decades of living paycheck to paycheck, one unexpected expense at a time. Joanne Dawkins is one of them.
I first heard about Joanne at a block party on the east side of Indianapolis last September. A mutual neighbor, knowing I cover Social Security and retirement benefits, pulled me aside. “You need to talk to my friend Joanne,” she said. “Her husband just retired and I don’t think they have anything saved. She won’t listen to anyone about it.” A week later, Joanne agreed to sit down with me at her kitchen table.
She is 49 years old, has been a home health aide for 25 years, and has been married to Marcus for 32 of them. In March 2026, Marcus, 57, took early retirement from a Midwest auto parts manufacturer. His pension — a modest $810 a month — was the closest thing to a financial plan they had. There were no 401(k) accounts. No IRAs. No savings to speak of. And Joanne, who earns approximately $38,500 a year caring for elderly clients in their homes, had never once looked at her Social Security statement.
“I Figured That Was for People Who Had Advisors”
When I asked Joanne why she had never checked her Social Security record, she didn’t hesitate. “I figured that was for people who had advisors and portfolios and all that,” she told me, folding her hands on the table. “We don’t have any of that. I work, Marcus worked, and someday we’ll stop. I thought that was the whole plan.”
That attitude — self-reliant, skeptical of the financial establishment — has defined how Joanne moves through the world. She grew up in a household where money was not discussed at the dinner table, and she carried that silence into adulthood. Two things had damaged their finances over the years: a medical emergency in 2017 that cost them roughly $14,000 out of pocket, and a period in 2019 when Joanne cut her hours to care for her aging mother. Both events took a measurable toll on her credit score, which by early 2024 had fallen into the low 500s.
“We paid our bills. We just couldn’t always pay them on time,” she said. “And when the hospital came calling, we made choices. You do what you have to do.”
The Number That Stopped the Conversation
It was Marcus’s retirement paperwork that finally forced the moment. The HR office at his plant handed him a packet that included a reminder to check his Social Security projected benefit. He came home and showed it to Joanne. For the first time, they both logged into the SSA’s my Social Security portal and looked at their statements side by side.
Marcus’s projected benefit at age 67 — his full retirement age — was approximately $1,490 a month, reflecting his higher-wage manufacturing years. Joanne’s was $1,180 a month at her own full retirement age of 67. Combined: roughly $2,670 a month in today’s dollars. Their current monthly expenses run close to $3,450.
That $780 monthly gap — before accounting for inflation, potential healthcare costs in retirement, or the reality that expenses rarely shrink cleanly — was the number that stopped the conversation cold. Joanne described sitting at the computer in silence for what felt like several minutes.
What the Statement Was Actually Telling Her
As Joanne and I went through the statement together, a few things became clear that she had not understood before. The projected benefit figure she saw assumed she would continue working at roughly her current earnings level until age 67. The year she reduced her hours to care for her mother — 2019 — showed a noticeable dip in her earnings record. That dip matters.
Social Security calculates retirement benefits using a worker’s 35 highest-earning years. Any year with zero or reduced earnings gets averaged in, which can pull the final benefit number down. For Joanne, who also had two part-time years in her late twenties when she was raising children, those lower-wage years are part of her permanent record. Her $1,180 projection reflected that history accurately — there was no error to dispute, no correction to file.
One detail that did shift Joanne’s thinking: the spousal benefit. Because Joanne’s own projected benefit is lower than half of Marcus’s, she may be eligible to receive a spousal benefit based on his record — potentially up to 50 percent of his PIA — if that amount exceeds her own. Whether that applies in their specific case depends on the exact figures and when each of them claims, which is something only the SSA can calculate definitively based on their actual records.
Where Things Stand Now — and What She Regrets
I met with Joanne twice. When I went back in late February 2026, the picture was still complicated. Marcus had started drawing a small amount from his pension. Joanne was still working full-time — and planned to keep working until at least 65. She had not opened any new savings accounts, though she mentioned Marcus had been looking into whether his former employer offered any post-retirement savings tools he had missed.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you we fixed it,” she said, without a trace of self-pity. “We’re 49 and 57. We didn’t start where we should have started. That’s just true.”
What Joanne now understands — and what took her two and a half decades of working life to confront — is that Social Security was never designed to carry a household alone. The average monthly retirement benefit in 2026 sits at approximately $1,927, according to SSA actuarial data. For a couple, that can feel more substantial. But for a couple with no other assets, no home equity tapped, and healthcare costs likely to rise in their sixties, the math requires honesty that many people — understandably — put off.
The table above reflects estimates based on Joanne and Marcus’s projected figures. It is not personalized advice — the SSA’s own calculators and a benefits counselor are the appropriate resources for their specific situation. What the numbers do illustrate is that claiming age alone can meaningfully shift the monthly arithmetic, for better or worse.
Joanne’s stubbornness, the quality her neighbor warned me about, is still very much present. She is not someone who spiraled into despair after checking the portal. She is someone who looked at the number, absorbed it, and kept going to work the next morning. Whether that resilience will be enough — whether the $780 monthly gap gets closed, partly closed, or simply lived with — is a question she cannot yet answer. And neither can I.
What I came away with, sitting in her kitchen both times, was something quieter than a success story. Joanne Dawkins worked 25 years, paid her taxes, raised her kids, cared for her mother, and cared for strangers in their homes. The system she paid into for a quarter century held a record of all of it. She just never looked. Now she has. And that, at least, is a start.
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