Have you ever thought about what would happen to your finances if someone else’s mistake became your legal problem? It is not a comfortable question, but it is the one that kept circling in my mind after I heard Marlene Rollins answer a radio host’s question about government benefits one Tuesday afternoon in January 2026.
I was listening to a Baltimore public radio segment called Money on the Line, a weekly call-in show where listeners share their benefit struggles in real time. Marlene was the third caller. She did not give her last name on air, but she described her situation clearly enough — freelance designer, declining income, a loan she had cosigned for an ex that went sideways — that I reached out to the station’s producer the same evening. They connected us within two days.
When I sat down with Marlene Rollins at a coffee shop in Baltimore’s Remington neighborhood on a cold Thursday in late January 2026, she arrived early. She ordered a plain drip coffee and pushed the sugar packets to one side. She was precise and guarded at first, the way people get when they have been burned by trusting too quickly.
A Freelance Career That Slowly Came Apart
Marlene, now 30, built a client list over four years doing brand identity work — logos, pitch decks, social media graphics — for small businesses across the Baltimore metro area. At her peak in early 2023, she was pulling in roughly $3,800 a month after expenses. Not wealthy, but stable. She paid her rent on time, kept a small emergency fund, and filed quarterly taxes without panic.
By mid-2024, the numbers had started sliding. Several of her anchor clients — a restaurant group and a boutique PR firm — cut their design budgets. New client inquiries slowed. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, self-employment income among creative services workers declined in 2024 as small businesses pulled back on discretionary spending. Marlene did not need a report to confirm what she was already living.
“I kept telling myself it was temporary,” Marlene told me, wrapping both hands around her coffee cup. “Every freelancer goes through slow seasons. I had been through them before and bounced back. But this one just kept going.”
By October 2025, her monthly net income had fallen to approximately $1,390. Her rent in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood was $960 a month. Utilities averaged $145. Her phone plan, health insurance through Maryland’s ACA marketplace, and a renter’s insurance policy consumed another $340 combined. The math had stopped working.
The Cosigned Loan That Changed Everything
The income decline would have been manageable — barely — if it had been her only problem. It was not. In the spring of 2022, during her marriage, Marlene had cosigned a $14,500 personal loan for her then-husband so he could consolidate credit card debt. She told me she signed the paperwork without reading the fine print about joint liability.
The marriage ended in 2023. The loan payments continued — until they did not. In February 2025, her ex-husband stopped making payments entirely. The lender, as is standard practice with cosigned debt, came after Marlene. Within sixty days, $14,500 in defaulted debt appeared on her credit report and collection notices began arriving at her apartment.
The credit score drop complicated everything downstream. A side gig she had pursued — designing templates for a stock asset platform — required a PayPal business account with a linked line of credit. The application was denied. A part-time contract role at a marketing agency fell through when the background check flagged the collections account. By August 2025, Marlene was running a deficit of roughly $400 a month, drawing down what remained of her emergency savings.
What SNAP Actually Looks Like for a Self-Employed Single Adult
Marlene had never considered herself a candidate for SNAP. As she explained it to me, her mental image of the program was someone in a fundamentally different situation — a family with young children, or someone with no income at all. She was neither. She was a professional with a portfolio and a client list, even if both had shrunk.
The reality is more nuanced. For a single-person household in Maryland in 2026, the gross monthly income limit for SNAP eligibility sits at 130 percent of the federal poverty level — approximately $1,580 per month. Marlene’s income, averaged over a three-month period as Maryland requires for self-employed applicants, came in at $1,390. She was eligible.
She applied online through the Maryland DHR benefits portal in November 2025. The self-employment section of the application required her to attach three months of bank statements, a profit-and-loss summary she created herself in a spreadsheet, and a signed statement explaining her business model. She told me it took four separate sessions over two weeks to gather everything.
The phone interview on November 17 was the part that nearly derailed her. The caseworker asked Marlene to explain why her reported income varied so much month to month — a standard question for self-employed filers, but one that felt accusatory in the moment. Marlene told me she started crying during the call and had to ask the caseworker to wait a moment before continuing.
The Approval and What It Actually Changed
Marlene was approved on December 4, 2025. Her monthly SNAP benefit was set at $214, loaded to an EBT card on the 9th of each month. According to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, the average monthly SNAP benefit for a single-person household in fiscal year 2025 was approximately $205, which placed Marlene slightly above average — a reflection of her very low countable income after the loan default’s financial aftermath was factored in.
The $214 does not cover everything. Marlene laid out her monthly food spending for me: she spends roughly $310 on groceries, which means the benefit covers about 69 percent of that cost. She makes up the remaining $96 out of pocket, a number that still stings but no longer forces the impossible choices she was making in October — skipping meals on days when client invoices had not cleared.
She is still dealing with the $14,500 debt. The collections account remains active. She has contacted the original lender twice about a repayment arrangement and received no written response as of late January 2026. Her credit score sits around 560. These problems do not vanish because of a monthly grocery benefit, and Marlene does not pretend otherwise.
What SNAP changed, she told me, was the specific anxiety of wondering whether she would be able to eat adequately while also keeping the lights on. Those two concerns no longer compete with each other in the same desperate way. The debt is still there. The income is still too low. But the floor has moved up slightly, and that matters in ways that are difficult to quantify.
What Marlene’s Story Reveals About Freelancers and the Benefits Gap
Marlene’s situation is not unusual, even if it feels isolating from the inside. The number of Americans who work primarily as self-employed or gig workers has grown substantially over the past decade, yet many of those workers remain unaware that their variable income can qualify them for programs designed primarily with wage-earners in mind. The documentation burden is higher, the application process more involved, and the outcome less predictable.
Several weeks after our first meeting, Marlene sent me a short message. She had landed a new recurring client — a small nonprofit in Towson — paying $650 a month for ongoing design work. It is not a reversal of fortune. It is one step. She will need to report the income change to Maryland DHR, which may reduce her SNAP benefit modestly at her June 2026 recertification.
She knew that when she took the client. She took it anyway.
Sitting across from Marlene in that Remington coffee shop, I kept coming back to the particular kind of resilience required to ask for help when your entire professional identity is built around self-sufficiency. The bitterness she carries is real. So is the strawberry she bought with an EBT card in December. Both belong to the same story, and neither cancels out the other. That is what I keep thinking about when I think about Marlene Rollins.
Related: The $14,000 Loan She Cosigned Destroyed Her Path to Social Security at 62
Related: He Cosigned a $22,000 Loan That Went Bad — Then He Found an IRS Program That Stopped the Bleeding
Leave a Reply