Cold Comfort: How to Cope With the Cost of Heating Your Home

Illustration by David Gothard

By early October Joyce M. Moore was wearing heavy sweaters indoors and bundling up in a fleece blanket. Upstate New York, where Moore has spent her 77 years, had already seen frost. That weather, combined with her heart and blood pressure problems, added up to cold days and colder nights for Moore.

Supported solely by Social Security, Moore confirms that huge price increases predicted for heating fuel this winter worry her. If it weren’t for a federal heating assistance program to help make ends meet, “I’d freeze,” she says. “I wouldn’t be able to stay here in the house because I couldn’t pay for the lights or buy groceries.”

She’s not alone. When the cold winds blow this winter, they’ll bring an extra chill to millions of older Americans who likely face record costs to heat their homes, even as other economic factors are squeezing tight budgets. Prices are going up across the country, but the Northeast will be hit hardest—so hard, in fact, that the Boston Globe called the spike in heating oil prices a potential “public health disaster.”

That’s no exaggeration. Heating oil may cost as much as 30 percent more than last winter, and natural gas 20 percent more, according to the Energy Information Administration, a statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. Electricity could be 5 to 10 percent more costly, and far more in some areas of the country where rate freezes established to ease the transition to deregulation are expiring.

Those statistics convert to a lot of dollars. According to the EIA, heating the average home with oil cost $1,939 last winter; this year it’s likely to cost $2,524. Those who heat with natural gas paid, on average, $855 last winter, compared with an expected $1,017 this year. And in households that use electric heat, the overall average bill is likely to rise from $858 to $944.

One factor is constant: The burden of heating costs will be disproportionately heavy on older Americans, especially those who live on fixed incomes in much greater numbers than their younger counterparts. Total income in more than a third of older households falls below $20,000 a year. As heating prices rise, those people pay an increasingly higher percentage of their income to stay warm than do more affluent families.

“We are really, really concerned about the elderly” this winter, says Robin Sherman, research manager at the University of Massachusetts’ Donahue Institute and lead author of a recent report on escalating home heating costs in Massachusetts. The institute’s research found that 60 percent of householders deemed to be “burdened” or “severely burdened” by the cost of heating their homes are over 60 years old; 44 percent are over 70. “This is a serious problem,” Sherman says.

Geography doesn’t help, either. More than 40 percent of older Americans—over 15 million people—live in the Northeast or the Midwest, the regions most prone to cold weather. Those are also regions where residents are most likely to heat with price-spiking natural gas or oil.

To make matters even worse in the Northeast, oil, which unlike electricity and natural gas can be withheld for nonpayment in many cold-weather states, is the overwhelming choice for home heating. Rumblings of trouble with energy bills were already evident as far back as August, when utility shutoffs for nonpayment were up 10 percent nationally over the previous year, the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association reported. Among customers of New York state’s major utilities, the increase was 17 percent, an Associated Press survey found.

“We are very concerned,” says Mark Wolfe, executive director of the NEADA. “The average Social Security check for a single person is about $1,094 per month, only about $100 a month more than the cost to fill up a tank of heating oil, and many families need up to three fill-ups for the winter.”

That’s very bad news for people like Dorothy Conley, who has lived in the same two-family home in South Boston for 54 years. She raised six children there, and a daughter and her family now live upstairs. Conley, now 81 and legally blind, is living on Social Security and worrying about the coming winter. Filling the house’s two oil tanks this fall cost $1,750. “I could hardly believe it,” she says. She expects to refill the tanks as often as once a month this winter.

How will she cope? “Lots of blankets,” Conley says, “and more long underwear!” But, she adds, she’ll do without some things this winter: “You cut back; you have to cut back.”

Another way Conley and millions of others cope is by applying for help from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a federal plan administered by the states. Conley received about $600 worth of oil through LIHEAP last year, she said, in addition to a donation of 100 gallons of oil from Citizens Energy Corp., a Boston-based nonprofit.

There is some good news: This fall, a bipartisan majority in Congress doubled LIHEAP funding for fiscal year 2009, which began on Oct. 1, 2008, raising the total available funds above $5 billion. Federal guidelines establish maximum incomes for individuals and couples, but eligibility and grant amounts vary from state to state.

Other federal help for low-income households comes from the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides funds to make homes more energy-efficient. The energy legislation that Congress passed this fall allocated $250 million for the program, higher than the previous year’s level.

There are other options. Many credit unions—including more than half of those in Maine—have begun offering their members low-interest loans to help pay for fuel.

As important as they are, government programs, private non-profit assistance and conservation-minded consumers are unlikely to solve the crisis that winter seems to bring, year after year, to millions of older Americans. Maine’s Sen. Olympia Snowe, R, has tacitly acknowledged that, saying, “We can no longer simply ‘patch’ the problem of rising energy costs.” She is pressing for a national policy that would diminish the country’s dependence on foreign oil.

Until that happens, though, older people across the country will be bundling up—and worrying.

Dianne Donovan is a writer in Maryland.