Americans Are Turning to GoFundMe Just to Get By

At this point, you have to have been trapped in space for the last two years not to notice that the cost of living is onerously high. Or you could just be the Treasury secretary.

In any case, there’s no shortage of metrics that show Americans are struggling: rising credit card delinquencies, a spike in foreclosure filings, surging demand for food banks, or the growing number of high-income Americans deciding to shop at budget stores like Dollar Tree.

Alternatively, you could just look at GoFundMe.

In October last year, GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan disclosed that the category the company calls “essentials,” which he defined as “things like rent, utility bills, car payments, sort of your basic things you need to get through life,” had “gone up significantly in the last three years” virtually everywhere the company does business. According to GoFundMe’s 2025 “Year in Help” report, fundraising for essentials had shot up 20 percent last year, monthly bills were the site’s second-fastest-growing category, and two of the six most common words in fundraiser descriptions were “bill” and “food.”

Sure enough, GoFundMe’s search results are littered with thousands of fundraisers asking friends, family, and strangers alike to chip in for all manner of essentials. The creator of one fundraiser from last year describes how he and his wife had to get rid of one of their cars because they couldn’t keep up with the car payments while also needing to repair another vehicle, all at the same time as they needed to refill their butane tank for winter heating.

“If it was just one of these that needed to be done we could figure it out. But with both issues there’s no way we can manage this by ourselves,” the husband wrote.

“We, so far, have been able to stay current on rent, but our electric is sky-high and is our only heating and cooling source,” pleads another page raising money to pay for electricity bills. “Our electric company runs a monopoly and there are zero other options to get power.”

American Carnage

Reading through these GoFundMe pages is like taking a tour through the wreckage of working-class American life in the 2020s, as rising prices for basic goods have battered households already burdened by sky-high debt, drug prices, and medical bills — and uniquely so in the developed world. The threadbare US welfare state, briefly expanded during the pandemic until it was allowed to unravel three years later, often proves far from a lifeline.

“One of my biggest struggles right now is affording my medication, which is very expensive without insurance, since I no longer have coverage,” wrote one Arkansas woman managing several serious health issues.

“I am on unemployment and am currently looking for another job but unemployment doesn’t pay much,” wrote a laid-off woman in Texas, who described having to leave town to move into an RV.

“What food stamps I get barely covers anything,” wrote one Iowa City man trying to raise $150 for groceries. Another man, a Wisconsinite who describes himself as “completely broke” and “desperately need[ing] groceries,” professes that his “only source of income is Social Security Disability which isn’t a whole heck of a lot.”

For some, government assistance never came, thanks to the Byzantine bureaucracy involved. One Virginia woman asking for grocery money for a friend described how he had been unexpectedly dropped from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) “due to some improperly filled out forms,” and was now having “to navigate a confusing and frustrating reapplication process, spending weeks trying to get answers.”

In many cases, the people behind fundraisers describe being plunged into financial crisis by a sudden, unforeseen event: the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, an injury, a mental health crisis, long-term hospitalization, or any number of other serious health incidents. “I don’t want to be homeless,” pleaded one Washington state man, who described losing his job and being diagnosed with a litany of health issues.

“If you’re reading this thinking this situation will never happen to you, I was there once too. On top of the world with everything figured out, then within days the ground crumbled beneath my feet,” wrote one Maryland father of three earlier this year.

Jobs Like You’ve Never Seen

The picture of the economy painted in these fundraising pages is a world away from the one described in political rhetoric. Carrying on a trend that started under Joe Biden, Donald Trump, his advisers and political allies, and his loyalists in the media have taken to insisting this is the “greatest economy ever,” or at least the strongest “in decades,” where “prices are coming down” and “you’re gonna have jobs like you’ve never seen.”

That’s not the economy that many of these GoFundMe users appear to live in, where losing a job out of nowhere is alarmingly easy, and finding a new one to replace it is remarkably hard.

“We have been looking for jobs but no luck,” one Texas man said about his family. “We’re in an employment drought,” wrote another user. “The job market was tougher than we imagined, and the search stretched on for months, so our emergency funds started to run out,” a San Antonio man wrote, describing how his husband had lost his job the previous year, before he himself underwent emergency surgery a month later.

One user — a Delaware woman needing rent money to cover the gap between when the mother whom she lives with lost her job and started her new one — used the fundraiser to try and get employment, advertising her services to anyone reading, since her DoorDash gig had proven grossly unprofitable. In an update a month later, things hadn’t improved: she was “literally applying to multiple jobs daily and constantly getting turned down.”

But maybe more revealing about the state of the economy is the fact that many of those fundraising for groceries and bills are employed — but they still can’t keep up with runaway costs anyway.

“Ever since my job cut my hours, I’ve been struggling with paying rent,” wrote one, echoing the complaint of another man who found himself unable to cover all of his basic costs once his hours were reduced.

“My current job doesn’t and hasn’t been paying me enough to live off of both rent and groceries,” wrote one woman, a twenty-two-year-old with autism, as she described how she was regularly skipping meals multiple times a week. “I am currently looking for a new one, but with the job market being tight, it’s quite difficult right now.”

Rent Is Too Damn High

In many cases, the crux appears to be the general expensiveness of life that has shot up over the past six years. A combination of the pandemic shutdowns, resulting supply chain bottlenecks, corporate greed, and a series of energy shocks has led prices to climb 25 percent since 2020.

It’s a state of affairs reflected in the pleas of fundraisers: “Lately it feels like no matter how much we try, we just can’t keep up”; “I’m effectively being priced out of being able to eat”; “Due to the falling economy and cost of food prices spiking I find myself in a desperate situation”; “With the cost of food going up so much, [my brother] simply can’t afford groceries.”

The soaring cost of housing in particular comes up again and again. “I work full time but my rent is so high I can’t afford my lights internet an [sic] I can’t even buy groceries or household items,” one Colorado woman wrote this past April. One Alabama man recounted a cascading set of financial struggles set off by the cost of moving to a new town, a decision he had been forced to make in the first place because rents where he used to live had become too expensive.

Several users specifically reported struggling to cover both rent and a security deposit for a new rental, part of a set of exorbitant up-front costs that set the median renter back more than $3,600.

“No mother should have to choose between paying rent, feeding her children, or keeping the lights on,” wrote one user about one such case, “a hardworking mother of four” she was trying to fundraise for.

Poverty on Purpose

For many, it was specific government policies that pushed them over the edge of a financial cliff in the midst of this affordability crisis. That included Trump’s tariffs, sold as a measure that would “bring back our manufacturing jobs, our energy jobs . . . and our dreams.”

“I have been unemployed for about ten months due to layoffs caused by tariffs,” wrote one California woman raising money for rent. “To stay afloat, I have exhausted my retirement and savings while using my tax refund to pay my rent and bills.”

For others, it was the government shutdown at the end of last year, which lasted a record six weeks. One single mother of three raising money for groceries described how a physically debilitating car crash years earlier had put her on government assistance, but “due to the government shut down, they have announced I may not be receiving my benefits next month for November.” This came up in the fundraising pitch of a Virginia woman trying to help her sister, a food inspector at a local poultry plant.

“Due to the shutdown, she has not received a paycheck since October 3rd, even though she is still working her 5am–2pm shift every day,” the woman wrote.

Many users appeared to have been impacted by Trump and the GOP’s budget cuts, particularly the provision that made $186 billion worth of cuts over ten years to the SNAP program, also known as food stamps, partly by expanding work requirements and throwing millions of Americans off of the benefit.

One user wrote that he had lost his SNAP benefits seemingly because of these new requirements, where he was “supposed to be doing more than I was doing, and they didn’t tell me that until I had been not doing it for long enough to kick me off the program.” “I recently got denied for my SNAP benefits because of new laws and requirements, which has made it much harder for me to get the support my family needs,” wrote a Texas woman needing help with groceries. “We know that SNAP benefits are being disrupted for many folks,” one Massachusetts woman raising money for her neighbor wrote.

But maybe the most frequently cited government policy cited by struggling GoFundMe users was Trump’s “mass deportation” operations. Many of these came out of Minnesota, where Trump’s Operation Metro Surge resulted in two murders by federal agents and led to mass civil disobedience.

One fundraiser for rent and groceries for six immigrant families in Minneapolis described them “living in fear, sheltering in their homes” to avoid abduction and deportation, leaving them unable to go to work or obtain necessities and “provide for themselves.” Despite an announced withdrawal in early February, “many community members continue to shelter-in-place, unable earn income for fear of violence,” a similar fundraiser warned two weeks later.

Similar fundraisers were posted from other impacted cities, like Los Angeles and Portland. One Texas user was crowdfunding for rent and groceries because her father had been deported. “He was the one that gave us money for groceries and now we are struggling,” the user wrote last September.

A Damning Indictment

Some of these pages actually meet their fundraising goals, which can range from many thousands of dollars to a couple of hundred. Many more do not. Sometimes they fail to pull in more than a single donation.

GoFundMe has always been something of a cracked mirror onto the state of life and the economy in the United States, in particular thanks to the mass reliance on crowdfunding to cover US households’ exorbitant medical bills. These pages have long served as an indictment of the United States’ uniquely privatized health care system, where even an insured person suffering a moderate medical event can find themselves plunged into financial crisis.

But the mass turn to crowdfunding for groceries, rent, and bills — and worse, its failure to often provide the necessary lifeline to Americans in need — is something else entirely. It suggests the US political economy is no longer just deeply flawed but fundamentally broken, one where neither the welfare state nor an economy with officially low unemployment nor even the generosity of others is enough to keep scores of people out of the poorhouse. In a system where even the well-off find themselves penny-pinching, who’s left to spare a dime?