Conventional wisdom says the biggest threat to retirement is not saving enough early. But the people I keep meeting in the field tell a different story — one where the savings existed, where the raises came, and where a single act of loyalty to someone they loved erased years of progress in a matter of months.
I met Pauline LaRoche in January 2026 on a Tuesday morning in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. I was riding along with a Meals on Wheels volunteer coordinator named Deb, documenting how food access and financial stress intersect for older adults on fixed incomes. Deb mentioned Pauline almost offhandedly: “There’s a woman on one of our regular routes — she’s not even a recipient, she’s a volunteer — but she came up to me after a delivery last month and asked if I knew anything about SNAP. She was embarrassed to ask.”
I reached out to Pauline the following week. She agreed to talk, but only after she got off her shift at the elementary school where she has worked as a custodian for fourteen years.
A Steady Job That Never Quite Felt Steady
Pauline LaRoche, now 61, has spent the better part of her adult life doing work that most people walk past without noticing. She mops hallways, empties wastebaskets, fixes broken stall latches, and sets up the gymnasium for school events that begin at 7 a.m. She earns $38,400 a year — a salary that, in her words, sounds reasonable until you start listing what comes out of it.
When I sat down with Pauline LaRoche at a diner on West 18th Street, she ordered coffee and kept her coat on. She has two children, ages 16 and 19, from a marriage that ended in 2018. A family court order requires her to pay $520 a month in child support, which she described not with resentment but with a kind of resigned math.
On top of child support, Pauline sends approximately $300 a month to her mother in Shreveport, Louisiana, who is 81 and lives alone. She has been doing this since 2020, when her mother’s health began to decline and her sister, who lives closer, fell into her own financial trouble. “I’m not the one who can afford it most,” Pauline told me, “but I’m the one who can’t say no.”
After rent ($1,050 for a one-bedroom in Bridgeport), utilities, transportation, food, and her obligations, Pauline estimated she was clearing roughly $400 to $500 a month of discretionary income by early 2023. Not a lot, but enough to feel like she was, barely, keeping up.
The Raise That Made Everything Worse
In March 2023, the Chicago Public Schools district bumped custodial salaries by roughly $2.80 an hour across the board — the result of a renegotiated union contract. For Pauline, that translated to an additional $437 a month in gross pay, or roughly $310 after taxes.
She told me what happened next with a small, self-aware laugh. “I knew better. I really did. But I’d been eating the same frozen meals for three years and my car had 190,000 miles on it and I thought — this is finally a little room.”
She upgraded her monthly food spending, started paying for a gym membership she had cancelled twice before, and began putting $80 a month into a savings account she opened at a credit union. By October 2023, she had saved just over $1,100. For the first time in years, she felt like she had a small cushion. Then her nephew called.
The Cosigned Loan and What It Cost Her
Pauline’s nephew, Marcus, 34, had been trying to buy a used cargo van to start a small delivery business. He had the hustle, she told me — he’d already lined up three clients — but his credit score was too low to qualify on his own. He needed a cosigner. He asked Pauline.
The loan was for $14,200 through a regional lender, with monthly payments of $318 over 48 months. Pauline told me she reviewed the paperwork, that Marcus showed her his business plan, and that she believed him. “He’s my sister’s boy. He worked hard. I thought I was helping him get a real start.”
Marcus made payments for five months. In March 2024, he stopped. By May 2024, the lender had contacted Pauline as the cosigner, and by August 2024, the account was referred to a collections agency. The unpaid balance at that point was approximately $12,800. The collections activity appeared on Pauline’s credit report within weeks.
The gym membership went. The credit union savings account was drained to cover two months of the loan before Pauline accepted she could not sustain it. Her credit score, which she described as “finally decent” at around 668, dropped by 94 points within 90 days of the collections referral.
“I didn’t sleep right for four months,” she told me. “I’d wake up at 3 a.m. doing the math in my head. And then I’d go mop floors at 6 and pretend everything was fine because my kids would see me at pickup and I didn’t want them to see their mom falling apart.”
Approaching 62 With a Broken Balance Sheet
By the time I met Pauline in January 2026, she was nine months away from her 62nd birthday — the earliest age at which she could begin claiming Social Security retirement benefits. The prospect occupied a complicated space in her thinking.
She had pulled her Social Security statement online and shared it with me. Based on her earnings record, her estimated benefit at 62 would be approximately $934 a month. If she waited until her full retirement age of 67, that number climbed to roughly $1,340. The difference — $406 a month — represents the permanent actuarial reduction that SSA applies to benefits claimed before full retirement age.
Pauline understood the math. She had read about it. What she told me next was the part that stuck with me: “Everyone says wait, wait, wait. But they’re not the ones coming home to a collection notice and an empty fridge. Waiting is a luxury.”
In late 2025, a school social worker helped Pauline apply for SNAP benefits. After a review of her income and household expenses — including the child support obligation and the collections debt affecting her net cash flow — she was approved for $186 a month in food assistance. It was the first time in her adult life she had applied for a government benefit outside of the school district’s employee health plan.
What Pauline’s Timeline Looks Like Now
When I asked Pauline to walk me through what her next two years look like, she paused for a long moment before answering. She is not planning to claim Social Security at 62. Not yet. But she is also not planning to wait until 67. She described a kind of holding pattern — working, paying down the collections balance in small increments, and hoping nothing else breaks.
She is realistic about the fact that something could force her hand. Her knees have been a problem for two years — an occupational hazard of the work. If she can no longer perform her custodial duties, her options narrow sharply. “I try not to think about the knees,” she said. “But I think about them every day.”
The Quiet Bravery of Keeping It Together
The detail that stayed with me long after our conversation was this: Pauline volunteers for Meals on Wheels on Saturday mornings. She is giving time and energy to support elderly neighbors on a fixed income — while quietly applying for her own government food assistance and managing a debt she did not create.
She does not appear to see a contradiction in this. When I pointed it out, she shrugged. “Those people need the food. What am I going to do, stay home?”
Pauline’s situation does not have a tidy resolution — not yet. She is still paying $186 on the collections account each month, still sending money to her mother, still showing up at 6 a.m. to mop hallways. The number she keeps coming back to is 2028, when her younger child ages out of support. That $520 a month feels, to her, like a distant finish line.
What her story surfaces is something the personal finance industry rarely addresses honestly: the financial consequences of being a person people depend on. The child support. The aging parent. The nephew with a dream. None of these were reckless choices. They were human ones.
I left the diner on West 18th Street thinking about how many people are doing the same invisible math — at kitchen tables, on lunch breaks, at 3 a.m. — and saying nothing about it to anyone. Pauline said something to Deb, the Meals on Wheels coordinator, only because she was embarrassed enough to ask quietly and Deb was kind enough to listen.
Sometimes that’s how these conversations start.
Related: He Cosigned a $22,000 Loan That Went Bad — Then He Found an IRS Program That Stopped the Bleeding
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