The rising cost of rent and groceries is forcing more older women to search for new ways to make ends meet.
The Institute of Aging's 2023-28 strategic plan showed that while older adults often face poverty, older women, who tend to live longer than men, are particularly affected by it.
Despite working for decades as an editor in the education sector, 67-year-old Katherine Goodes says she has no prospect of retiring unless she finds a way to reduce her basic expenses.
Without significant savings, and monthly government support cheques barely covering the rent on her apartment in Oshawa, Ontario, Goodes reached out to Senior Women Living Together, a non-profit connecting older women who want to share homes due to financial issues or loneliness.
She's set to move into a farmhouse east of Norwood, Ontario with three other housemates in June, which will see her pay 600-dollars in rent a month, less than half of what she pays for her current apartment.
She says she's looking forward to the ``financial relief'' but is a little apprehensive about how she will adjust to sharing a home with three other women.
Pat Dunn, the founder of Senior Women Living Together, says her organization has helped Goodes and 46 other older women to find housemates across Ontario since it was established in 2019.
Dunn, who now lives with two other women herself, struggled economically after her husband died when she was 64.
She created a Facebook group with the idea of finding other older women in a similar situation who she might be able to share the burden of rent with.
She says she was soon overwhelmed by how many others were going through the same challenges.
While there are financial support programs available for older Canadians, she says there's a lack of options specifically for the economic challenges older women face.
Sarah Kaplan, the director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the Rotman School of Management, says older women have faced economic struggles for years.
She points out women often earn less in their lifetime than men due to reasons that include a gender pay gap, the fact that they're more likely to be caregivers to children early in their careers and also caregivers to aging parents in their later earning years.