Roughly 4 in 10 Americans over age 65 report that their retirement income leaves them financially vulnerable to even a single unexpected disruption — and that statistic took on a very specific face when I met Nolan Kirby last January. A veterans’ support group in the South Bay area had reached out to me after Nolan spoke at one of their monthly meetings, describing a financial unraveling that had started quietly and then accelerated fast. His counselor thought his story was worth telling. After one phone call, I agreed.
I sat down with Nolan at a diner near his home in San Jose on a Tuesday morning in late January 2026. He arrived early, ordered black coffee, and had a yellow legal pad covered in handwritten notes. At 66, he carries himself like someone who is used to solving problems — he spent nearly three decades as a petroleum engineer — but the past several months had presented a different kind of problem: the kind where the variables keep changing and the equations never quite balance.
The Moment the Budget Stopped Working
Nolan’s wife, Sandra, had been working part-time as an administrative coordinator for a logistics firm in Milpitas. Her income — roughly $2,100 a month — was not extravagant, but in the context of their household finances, it was load-bearing. Nolan had begun drawing Social Security benefits at 65, pulling in approximately $1,840 per month, supplemented by a small pension from his years in the energy sector that added another $610 monthly. Together, they were bringing in close to $4,550 a month before taxes.
In September 2025, Sandra was laid off. The firm had restructured, and her position was eliminated with two weeks’ notice and a modest severance of $3,200. Their household income dropped by nearly 46 percent almost immediately. In San Jose, where the median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment exceeded $2,800 as of late 2025, that was not a manageable dip.
“We had a plan,” Nolan told me, tapping his legal pad. “Sandra was going to work until 65, we’d have a couple of years of overlap, and then we’d downsize. September blew that plan up completely.”
The severance covered October’s mortgage and not much else. By November, Nolan said, they were pulling from a savings account they had earmarked for home repairs.
Navigating Unemployment and Social Security — at the Same Time
Sandra filed for California unemployment insurance within the first week of the layoff. That part, Nolan said, went relatively smoothly. Under California’s Employment Development Department program, she qualified for a weekly benefit based on her recent earnings — ultimately receiving approximately $485 per week, which translated to roughly $1,940 per month. According to the California EDD, the maximum weekly benefit in 2025 was $450 to $550 depending on the wage base calculation, so Sandra’s amount was near the top of the range given her prior salary.
That helped stabilize October and November. But Nolan had a separate, more complicated question: could Sandra begin drawing Social Security early? She was 63 at the time of the layoff — old enough to file for early retirement benefits, but doing so would mean accepting a permanent reduction in her monthly benefit.
Nolan had done the math more than once. Sandra’s projected benefit at full retirement age of 67 was estimated at around $1,320 per month. Filing at 63 would reduce that to roughly $990 — a difference of $330 every month for the rest of her life. “That’s nearly $4,000 a year we’d be leaving on the table permanently,” he said. “I couldn’t bring myself to pull that trigger.”
They decided against early filing, at least for now. Instead, they leaned on the unemployment benefit and began cutting wherever they could.
The Side Hustle Strategy — and Its Limits
Nolan’s personality makes sitting still difficult. His veterans’ group counselor described him to me as someone who is always “running three ideas at once” — and that tracked with everything he told me about the fall of 2025. While managing the household budget crisis, he was also pursuing two side income streams: consulting on small environmental compliance projects for drilling operations, and reselling refurbished tools through an online marketplace.
The inconsistency of that income created its own problem. Nolan said he found himself unable to predict whether a given month would be a $700 month or a $1,500 month from the side work, which made paying quarterly estimated taxes a guessing game. He underpaid his self-employment estimates in Q3 2025 and is now bracing for a penalty on his 2025 return.
He also discovered — after the fact — that California’s Earned Income Tax Credit and the federal EITC have different thresholds for taxpayers over 65, and that his investment income from a small brokerage account had interacted with his Social Security benefits in ways he hadn’t anticipated under the IRS’s combined income formula.
What the 2025 COLA Actually Meant for Them
In October 2024, the Social Security Administration announced a 2.5 percent cost-of-living adjustment for 2025. For Nolan, that translated to an increase of approximately $46 per month on his Social Security check, bringing it from roughly $1,794 to about $1,840. He was direct about what that meant in practice.
“Forty-six dollars,” he said, with a short, dry laugh. “My grocery bill went up more than that between January and September. We shop at the same store, buying the same things. The COLA is better than nothing, but it’s not keeping pace with what things actually cost in the Bay Area.”
His assessment is consistent with how many fixed-income households experience COLA adjustments. The 2025 COLA of 2.5 percent was lower than the 3.2 percent adjustment in 2024, which itself followed the historic 8.7 percent bump in 2023 tied to peak inflation. The Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan advocacy group, estimated that Social Security benefits have lost approximately 20 percent of their purchasing power since 2010.
A Mixed Outcome — With Regret About One Decision
By the time I met Nolan in late January 2026, the household had stabilized somewhat. Sandra had begun part-time administrative work at a local nonprofit, bringing in about $1,250 per month. Combined with Nolan’s Social Security, pension, and sporadic consulting income, they were clearing roughly $3,700 to $4,100 monthly depending on the month — still below their pre-layoff level, but livable.
The savings account they had been building for home repairs had been reduced from approximately $18,400 to around $13,600 during the four-month gap. That loss stung. “That money was for a new roof,” Nolan said. “Now we’re hoping the roof holds another couple of years.”
His one concrete regret involved a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program application. A friend had suggested the couple might qualify for SNAP during the period when their income had dropped sharply, but Nolan had not pursued it, assuming they wouldn’t be eligible. When I asked him about this, he paused.
“I didn’t think we were SNAP people. I know that sounds like pride. Looking back, in October and November, we might have actually qualified. I didn’t even look into it. That was probably a mistake.” According to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, SNAP eligibility for households with a member over 60 uses a net income threshold of 100 percent of the federal poverty level, which in 2025 was approximately $1,732 per month for a two-person household — a threshold their temporary income profile may have approached.
What Nolan Wants Other Couples in This Situation to Understand
Nolan is not someone who gives up easily. When I asked what he wished he had known going into the fall of 2025, he didn’t hesitate. He had clearly thought about this before.
He specifically mentioned the Medicare Savings Programs — federal programs administered through Medicaid that can help cover Medicare premiums, deductibles, and co-pays for lower-income beneficiaries. During their income dip in late 2025, the couple may have temporarily qualified for one of the four Medicare Savings Program tiers. Nolan said he learned about these programs from a fellow attendee at the veterans’ group meeting — not from any government outreach.
Leaving that diner, I found myself thinking about the specific arithmetic of Nolan and Sandra’s situation: two people who had done what the conventional wisdom asks — saved, worked, contributed — and still found themselves spending down a home repair fund to cover groceries. The federal programs they accessed helped. The ones they didn’t know about in time to use, didn’t. That gap between what exists and what people actually access on the worst month of their year is, in my experience covering this beat, one of the most consistent and least discussed features of the American economic relief system.
Nolan is already researching new side income opportunities. He mentioned drone inspection work for infrastructure projects as something he’s been looking into. He had a notebook tab for it.
Related: My 2026 Tax Refund Showed ‘Processing’ for 31 Days — Here Is What the IRS Actually Told Me
Leave a Reply