A look inside the financial diaries of $2 a day households with Daryl Collins

Emily Spivack ( Bio  /   Posts )  |  Tuesday, March 15, 2011 UTC

You earn money. You try to save some. You spend most of it. You attempt to stick to a budget. Rent, cell phone, heat and electricity, some groceries. Juggling your income and expenses is manageable, more or less. 

But what if you were living on $2 a day, as 40% of the world’s population does? How would you make ends meet then? Is managing money even an option? That’s what Daryl Collins set out to determine when she co-authored Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day.

The assumption may be that the poor have very little financial life, but when she and her colleagues started to interview low-income households in Bangledesh, India and South Africa every two weeks over the course of a year, they saw something different. From the financial diaries the 250 participants kept, a picture emerged of families with sophisticated financial lives, borrowing and saving as well as maintaining diverse “financial portfolios.”

For a peek inside some of these households’ financial diaries, check out Collins’ PopTech talk above.

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