r/povertyfinance

I got into this field knowing that what a guy, a random guy at a gas pump told me. We got to chatting under the gas pump roof while it was pouring rain out and he told me he retired from a WasteWater Treatment plant and he doesn't miss days like today because of all the rain.

I ended up looking into the field and accepting a job. While hours, responsibility, jobs all that heavily depend on where you're located, I will NEVER leave this industry. The pay wont make you rich by any means but I am decently comfortable. I have a pension with a 2.25x multiplier and a 10 year vest. This has been by far the best job I've ever had. I always tell people about this industry and everybdoy is shocked because either they dont know about it, or are grossed out by it. While this job can be gross I'd say 99% of the time im very clean. (Lets not talk about the 1%).

This is a type of career that is moderate into science, microbiology, hydrolics but you dont need to have a PhD to do this. It's very manageable. I've had nothing but help and support in this field. Anyway just thought id post this to open people's eyes that not all Trade Skill jobs are plumber/electrion/carpenter. If you're in the market please dont look past this sector. If anybody has any questions about it feel free to ask and id love to answer. I did not grow up into money. I have and had to work for every dollar ive earned. I dont think id be where im at today without that older gentlemen chatting with me in the rain. I still hold on to my frugal lifestyle. I'm not rich by anymeans, I dont have money in the bank to last me a year without a job but I make an honest (good for my area) paycheck where I can have my bills paid, a stocked pantry and a few fun little toys and some camping trips. This is what we are all searching for. The working man's dream, at least at my plant.

This started as a desperate measure during a particularly tight month and somehow became a habit I actually look forward to. The soup changes slightly each week depending on what is on sale or what needs to be used up, but the base is always the same: some kind of beans, whatever vegetables are cheap that week, broth I make from vegetable scraps I keep in a bag in the freezer, garlic, an onion, some spices. The whole pot costs somewhere between three and five dollars depending on the week and it makes enough for six to eight servings.

What it actually changed for me was the Tuesday through Thursday problem. Those are the days I used to be most likely to buy food because I was tired from work and didn't want to cook and there was nothing easy in the fridge. That specific combination of tired plus nothing ready equals spending money I didn't plan to spend, and it was happening more often than I wanted to admit. Having a container of soup in the fridge that just needs two minutes in the microwave removed that decision almost entirely. I stopped buying lunch at work three days a week because I just brought the soup.

I'm not going to pretend a pot of soup fixed my finances. It didn't. But it closed one specific leak that was costing me somewhere between twenty and forty dollars a week without me fully noticing it, and it did it in a way that didn't feel like deprivation. If anything the sunday cooking became somthing I genuinely enjoy now, which I did not expect at all when I started doing it out of necessity.

my SNAP benefits were recently cut to $24/month, unexpectedly. How am I going to live on this? even if I eat ramen every day, I'll still need to eat sleep for dinner a few days a month to get by with only $24 for food.

please post your cheapest recipes. I'm currently stocked up on dry rice and dry beans from the food pantry. I have yeast and flour, so I can start baking my own bread again. what should I prioritize buying with my $24/month food budget?

also, are there any vitamin/mineral deficiencies I should be on the lookout for?

Graduating in 4 weeks with nothing lined up. No internships, no work related experience other than dead end jobs. I worked full time while being in college and did it improve my job prospects?? The answer is no. Plus I have 26k in student loans.

So being 29 years old with only food experience and general labor construction is really a great way to start a career right?? I’m being sarcastic but you get the point.

I want to be clear that I am not someone who has their finances figured out. I'm still living pretty close to the edge and I don't have anywhere near what the standard advice says you should have saved. But about seven months ago I managed to scrape together $600 and I made a rule for myself that I was not allowed to touch it unless something genuinely broke or I had a medical situation. It took me almost four months to get there because every time I got close something would come up.

The thing nobody really explains is that the psychological effect kicks in way before you hit any official threshold. I don't wake up at 3am doing the math in my head as often as I used to. When my landlord mentioned they might be raising rent I felt dread but not the specific terror I would have felt six months ago. When a coworker mentioned their car needed brake work I didn't immediately feel it in my chest because I wasn't thinking about my own car and imagining that scenario happening to me with nothing behind it.

Six hundred dollars does not solve anything structurally. I know that. It wouldn't cover a real emergency, it barely covers half of one in most cases. But it changed something about how I move through my days that I wasn't expecting and that I genuinely cannot fully explain. There is a difference between having nothing and having a little and it is not a proportional difference. It is much larger than the number suggests. If you are trying to decide whether it is worth delaying something small to start building even a tiny cushion, I would say yes from experiance, even before it feels like enough to matter.

I work full time, 40 hours a week, sometimes a little more. I don't have a car payment because I drive an older car I paid cash for. I don't have credit card debt. I pack my lunch most days, I don't have a gym membership or streaming subscriptions I forgot about, I cook at home the majority of the time. I have done all the things you're supposed to do. I am not living beyond my means. And I still end every single month with almost nothing left over and one unexpected expense away from a real problem. Last month it was a $340 car repair. The month before that my cat needed vet care that came out to just under $200. Those are not emergencies in the dramatic sense, they are just normal life things that happen, and each one of them wipes out whatever small buffer I had managed to build. I know mathematically that I need to earn more and not just cut more, I understand that, but in the meantime I am doing everything the personal finance world tells you to do and the margin is still basically zero. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm tired of the implication that being in this position means you made bad choices somewhere. Some of us are just in jobs and markets and situations where the math doesn't work no matter how carefuly you manage it. It's not a discipline problem. It's an income problem and those are different things and I wish more people understood that distincion without needing you to prove your frugality first before they'll take your situation seriously

I (15F) live with my mom, sister, aunt, cousins, grandma, and uncle. It’s always been only my mom and sister with me — no one else in the house cares about us. They forbid me from eating the food that they buy, using the things they have, and have even placed a camera in the living room just to watch people in the kitchen. My mom’s acc is entirely empty, my sister’s too, and I can’t get a job or sell anything because we don’t have anything. The only thing we have is cup noodles and they’re almost over, so I don’t know how we’ll get through this month or the next

my internet bill crept up to $89 a month and i finally got fed up enough to actually call and say i was canceling. i had maybe $40 set aside to cover the gap while i figured out a new provider

the second i said cancel they transferred me to the "retention team" or whatever, i was half paying attention playing on my laptop when the lady pulled up my account and goes "i can see you've been with us since 2023, let me see what i can do" and just... offered me 400mbps for $67 a month with no contract

same company. same address. just never called

apparently there's a whole internal pricing tier that existing customers never see unless they threaten to leave. i was genuinely annoyed, like why is the new customer rate just automatically better, why do they count on people not calling

anyway if you have any subscription you've had for more than a year and never questioned it might be worth a call. took me 11 minutes

I want to push back a little on something that gets repeated constantly in frugal and personal finance spaces because I followed it for a while and it backfired on me in ways that took me too long to recognize.

The standard advice is that buying in bulk saves money per unit and therefore you should always buy the larger size or the warehouse quantity when you can. And mathematically that is often true. But there are a few things that advice assumes that weren't true for my situation. It assumes you have the storage space. It assumes you will actually use all of it before it expires or goes stale. And most importantly it assumes you have enough cash on hand that spending $40 on a bulk item instead of $8 on a regular size doesn't create a problem elsewhere in your budget that week.

For about a year I was regularly buying bulk quantities of things because I had convinced myself it was the smart financial move. What was actually happening was that I was spending more money upfront than I had, occasionally letting things go to waste because I couldn't use them fast enough, and creating these weird gaps in my weekly budget because I had front loaded my spending on bulk items. I was optimizing for cost per unit while ignoring cash flow, and cash flow is what actually determines whether you can make it to the next paycheck.

What works better for me now is buying the regular size of most things and only going bulk on the three or four non perishable items I use constantly and know I will finish. Rice, oats, coffee, dish soap. Everything else I buy as needed. My weekly spending got more predictable and I stopped having those weeks where I was technically "saving money" but somehow couldn't aford anything

The thing that actually helped me stop impulse buying online was adding one extra step that takes 30 seconds and feels almost too simple to work I want to preface this by saying I had tried all the standard advice. Unsubscribe from marketing emails, delete your saved payment info, use a separate browser without autofill, take things out of your cart and wait 24 hours. Some of that helped a little. None of it fully worked for me because the urge doesn't live in the checkout button, it lives in the moment when you open a tab and start browsing in the first place. What actually worked was this: I created a note on my phone called "stuff I almost bought" and the rule is that before I buy anything that isn't food or a genuine necessity I have to add it to the note first with the price and the date. That's it. That's the whole system. I don't have to wait a specific amount of time, I don't have to justify it to anyone, I just have to write it down. What I found is that the act of writing it down does something to the impulse that nothing else did. When a purchase exists only as a feeling it has a kind of urgency to it. When it exists as a line of text that says "gray oversized hoodie $47 march 14" it becomes a fact instead of a feeling and facts are much easier to evaluate calmly. Most of the time I look at the list a few days later and genuinely cannot remember why I wanted the thing badly enough to almost buy it. I've been doing this for about five months. My note currently has 31 items on it. I have bought exactly four of them. I'm not saying I fixed anything, I still have the impulse, but I gave it somwhere to go that isn't my bank account and that has made a real difference.

This will probably turn into a rant. Yes, I know there should of been active insurance. It would’ve existed if it was affordable. To start, my (20F) father (50M) went to the ER last week for excruciating pain via ambulance because he couldn’t walk. Obviously we live in the US, in an income based medicaid state (Virginia) , which makes his $21/hr too high income to qualify for medicaid. The insurance through his employment would not of allowed him to afford rent and similar bills, so he is uninsured. His rental is private owned and one of the most affordable units in the area.

Long story short, he was admitted and then transferred to another hospital due to cancer concerns, and was officially diagnosed with stage IV cancer over the weekend. Although the cancer treatment is primarily outpatient, given it has metastasized to his brain and the severity of his pain (lytic lesion on spine), they have started treatment while inpatient. The pain is still severe while receiving a mix of IV and oral opioids. Each time he rates it a 8-9 when scaled towards 10. However, they want to discharge him tomorrow.. while also starting a new pain medication tomorrow

My dad lives alone (I am on a lease for shared housing), no other family to assist, and we have emphasized to the doctors, palliative care, and the caseworker how there is approximately 20 outdoor steps he has to take to enter his building. He physically could not do this walk them to go to hospital. I’ve spoken with the caseworker, and the available options to assist with this require insurance. My dad doesn’t qualify for medicaid, and is currently using the rest of his PTO balance as we work on FMLA. He worked through the pain until he physically couldnt, and now its being used against him.

We are working with the financial assistance team to file for disability and they have connected us with a charity program that can help with commercial insurance premiums, but that would not be effective until May 1st and it will not backdate. Also applied for assistance with his hospital bills, no updates. The hospital doesn’t even want to involve physical therapy to assess his condition, everything is being rejected due to no insurance. I am not strong enough to assist him in going up and down the stairs, yet he also has multiple planned appointments throughout the next few weeks. I looked into local cancer programs, but I’m not having any luck since we don’t have any invoices or fit the income criteria.

What even can someone poor do in a situation like this? There is no family or friends close enough to assist. If he can’t make it to his appointments because of that, am I really stuck having to watch him deteriorate until the charity insurance program can start? Once his disability can start, I’d imagine it still wont be enough to pay bills + treatment.. even with coinsurance I’m sure it’s still going to be unbelievably expensive… no estimates yet. We don’t know how much the pain medication will be. I work full time, while also a student, now I am going to be a designated care taker. I havent worked long enough for FMLA. So many things would be easier if we werent poor. Can’t even afford my mental health because that requires time, and almost all of my mental struggles were linked to poverty; which many therapists dont understand anyway. Being poor is going to take away my dad quicker than the cancer will. I can’t believe even the caseworker is stunned at this scenario. What can we even do? Is the only option is for him to risk falling down his outdoor steps ? Couldn’t outpatient treatment reject him due to no insurance preventing as well? This feels like a dead end.. but maybe someone here has dealt with something similar.

For a long time, I bought into the standard American way of doing things: you buy your own lawnmower, your own tools, your own bulk groceries, and you mind your own business. But let's be real—capitalism thrives on us being completely isolated. Buying a separate set of everything for every single house on the street is a luxury we literally can't afford anymore.

A few months ago, I was talking to a neighbor who grew up in an Asian immigrant household, and we realized how backward the "every man for himself" mindset is during an economic crunch. In many Asian cultures, surviving hard times isn't about grinding a third side-hustle; it’s about leaning hard into your community.

We decided to stop trying to out-earn inflation independently and started treating our little block like a "kampung" (a village). We built a hyper-local micro-economy based on communal sharing. Here is how we adapted it to our very standard, previously isolated US neighborhood:

1. The "Asian Market" Bulk Split Buying food at regular chain grocery stores is a scam right now.

• The Shift: Instead of buying overpriced 2lb bags of rice or small spice jars, three of our households do a joint run to the massive local Asian supermarket (like H Mart or 99 Ranch) once a month.
• How it works: We buy the 50lb bags of jasmine rice, massive flats of eggs, wholesale produce, and big bottles of sauces. We bring it back, lay it out on my driveway, and split it three ways into our own containers. It cuts our staple grocery bills in half, and the quality is honestly better.

2. Labor Swapping (The "Gotong Royong" Method) In the West, if your sink leaks or you need a fence painted, you either pay a contractor $150/hour or spend your entire weekend miserably doing it alone. In many Asian communities, there's a concept of mutual aid (often called Gotong Royong in Southeast Asia) you pool your labor.

• The Shift: We created a group chat called "The Block Roster." I am good at basic plumbing; my neighbor Dave knows car maintenance; Sarah has a heavy-duty power washer.
• How it works: When Dave’s deck needed sealing, three of us went over and knocked it out in two hours. Next week, Dave helped me change my brake pads. We don't exchange money. We exchange time and skills.

3. The "Aunty" Approach to Socializing Going out to a restaurant or bar just to socialize is now a $50+ affair. We were all just isolating at home because we were too broke to hang out.

• The Shift: We stopped caring about having aesthetically perfect, Pinterest-ready houses to host people.
• How it works: Every other Friday, someone hosts a communal dinner. It is not fancy. It’s usually a giant pot of soup, curry, or just massive bowls of noodles. Everyone brings a side dish or whatever is left in their fridge. It acts as our free "third place" to vent and hang out without spending a dime.

The Reality Check

I’m not going to pretend this is a flawless utopia. Building this takes time because Americans are deeply conditioned to feel "guilty" about asking for help. You have to swallow your pride a bit. We also had to set boundaries—this only works with people who pull their weight. If someone is constantly taking and never giving, the village model collapses.

But honestly? Treating my neighbors like an extended family instead of strangers I wave at twice a year has been the best financial (and mental) decision I've made.

Has anyone else leaned into their community or cultural roots to bypass this crazy economy? What communal habits are actually working for you guys?

•Mortgage (incl. taxes/insurance): $2,800~

•Truck payment: $730 (27k left, work paid for it, but now it’s my only vehicle and will now begin paying out of my own pocket)

•PG&E (includes gas): $100~+ annual trueup for solar

•AC financing: $113 (had to get a new unit last year 8k loan)

•Internet: $120(definitely could lower)

•Phone: $212(included financed phones for wife and I)

•Insurance: $215 (Geico cheapest in my area)

•Groceries: $1,200~(varies as always)

•Student loans (you + wife): $400

•Water: $125~

•Trash: $50

Total Monthly: ~$6,065~

Money I have:

35k in 401k

15k in bank

We suffered my wife’s lost job during her pregnancy and we definitely lost a nest egg then. She has been unable to find work since. I also didn’t want her to as I wanted her to be home with our daughter.

In the end, just looking for advice on what avenues we can take to move forward to prepare for soon to be lost job and

I’m trying to figure out the bare minimum income if need to survive with myself, my wife, and daughter.

I need it for essential medication (lithium and estradiol) for Bipolar disorder and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). I cannot go without it or I get extremely sick. I can’t donate plasma or blood because I’m too unwell right now.

Any legit gig work, online tasks, or fast ways to get this money would be a huge help.

edit and yes I work im in the middle of a move and in between jobs for about a month

I want to preface this by saying I spent an embarrassing amount of time just quietly struggling with my electric bill before I accidentally stumbled onto this. I was on the phone with my utility company about a payment arrangement and the rep mentioned almost in passing that I might qualify for their low income rate program. I had been a customer for four years and nobody had ever mentioned this to me once.

I looked into it and my state has a program through the utility itself that reduces your monthly rate by around 30 percent if your income falls below a certain threshold. The application took maybe 20 minutes and required proof of income and a recent bill. I was approved in about ten days. My bill went from around $140 a month to just under $95. That is not nothing.

After that I started digging and found out there are usually several layers of assistance available depending on your state and situation. There's the federal LIHEAP program which helps with heating and cooling costs and a lot of people have no idea it exists. Many gas companies have their own separate discount programs. Some water utilities do too. None of this was information I found easily, I had to look for it, and the utility company certainly wasn't going to bring it up on their own.

If you are struggling with any utility bill right now I would genuinely recomend calling and asking directly if they have a low income rate or assistance program. Some reps won't bring it up unless you ask. Also google your state name plus LIHEAP and your specific utility company name plus "low income program." It takes maybe an hour of research and the savings can be significant and ongoing

I was watching a video yesterday and the woman mentioned that if you get Knor bullion cubes in a pack of 6 in the soup aisles it's more expensive than the same pack of 8 in the Mexican food aisle. It's made me wonder if there are other things that are cheaper.

I feel like I have imposter syndrome with my financial situation…. Anyone else?