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One of the struggles of covering personal finance is that the tips and tricks most experts recommend only make sense for a certain group of people: Those who have some disposable income and are likely upwardly mobile. Sure, you can write about handling setbacks and how big an emergency fund should be, but standard advice won’t work for everyone.




How to apply for SNAP benefits, the necessity of a side hustle not to just make a little extra cash, but to survive—those subjects can often feel taboo, particularly if covered in a publication or on a site that does not have a supportive community. A new subreddit, r/povertyfinance, evolved from the r/personalfinance blog to fill that space.

“The goal here is to help anyone who doesn’t have a lot of breathing room get to a place where they have stability, comfort, contingency, and maybe even a little luxury,” reads the site. It’s aiming to help people learn to live within their means, cut expenses, and reduce debt.


It’s brand new, so it’s still figuring out exactly what will be covered, but it’s already filled with a variety of posts from people who want to genuinely help each other out, like this post about calling companies you use twice a year (which we’ve written about before) and this discussion of the Welfare Cliff.

The main personal finance subreddit itself is full of great information and money conversations, but it does tend to assume some sort of baseline knowledge and fluency in topics like budgeting and investing. If you’re a novice or struggling to make ends meet, r/povertyfinance could be an invaluable resource.