How to help if you have no money

The most common reason for not starting goes like this: I myself have nothing left before payday. It is an honest reason, but it answers the wrong question. For a lonely elderly person the shortage is rarely only in the wallet.

In June 2025 WHO released a report on social connection. Loneliness affects about one person in six in the world, and social isolation, by estimate, up to one elderly person in three. Loneliness is linked to about 100 deaths every hour, over 871,000 a year.

These numbers are not about someone lacking money for cheese. They are about there being no one nearby. A transfer does not close this; presence does, and presence needs neither a card, nor a status, nor special training.

The cheapest form of help is the telephone, and it is the one most often undervalued. The difference between “I'll call sometime” and real help is one thing: an agreed day and hour that are not moved.

Do not ask “how are you”; the answer is “fine”. Ask something specific: whether the pension lasted to the end of the month, whether the tablets they took last week have run out, whether the water was off again. Write the answers in your phone notes, because next time you will forget and the person will not.

Ten minutes a week is over eight hours of attention a year. No one-off grocery pack gives that.

A household trifle in the flat of an 80-year-old stops being a trifle. By WHO estimates, about 684,000 people die from falls around the world every year, and the largest number of fatal falls is among people over 60. Another 37.3 million falls a year are serious enough to need medical care.

Half the work here costs nothing. Fix the mat in the hallway so it does not slide. Screw in a brighter bulb between the room and the toilet. Remove the extension cord lying across the passage. Put a stool in the shower.

The second half costs pennies and half an hour: a dripping tap, a window latch that will not hold, a balcony door that will not close, a bag that is hard to carry up to the third floor. People do not ask about this, because it is embarrassing to ask a stranger for something domestic.

One caution: ask permission before rearranging anything. A flat is the person's territory. Things that a hand found blindly for twenty years may be lost for ever after you tidy up.

Many people do not receive what they are entitled to not because they were refused, but because they never got that far. An application, a certificate, a queue, a confusing website, and everything is put off until “later”.

The simplest example is the social service of home care. The application is accepted by the community's social manager, it can be submitted on paper or electronically, and an administrative services centre can also accept it at the declared place of residence. If the person has applied straight to the service provider, the provider itself passes the notification to the community's authorised body within one working day.

The application and documents are also accepted online: through the Diia portal, including its mobile app, and through the Ministry of Social Policy's social web portal soc.gov.ua. The service is free, paid or with a differentiated fee depending on the person's income. And right away about the shelf life of this advice: the government approved the current procedure on 14 January 2026, and the previous one, in force since 2020, ceased to be valid on 26 January 2026. Check the list of documents and the steps on the spot, not from an article.

If the question is legal, there is free legal aid: the contact centre 0 800 213 103, the call is free. Your role here is not a lawyer. Your role is to find the number, dial it, sit next to the person while they talk, write the answer down on paper and print what needs printing.

Getting to the polyclinic alone means stairs, a queue, the registration desk, a ticket and an hour on one's feet. Accompanying means something else: calling by, waiting while they get dressed, taking them there, sitting out the queue next to them, carrying the bag back.

The most valuable part often comes at the end. The person leaves the doctor and five minutes later remembers half of what was said. You do not advise treatment and do not make diagnoses; you simply write down what the doctor said and leave the sheet on the table where it can be seen.

The same goes for shopping. A list on paper, not in your head. Keep the receipt. Hand back the change to the last kopeck and count it aloud, because trust is built on small things and destroyed on them even faster.

This also includes trips that seem small to you: the bank branch, the post office, a pharmacy two streets away. For you it is twenty minutes, for a person with bad knees it is an event that is put off for months.

People burn out not from the load but from the gap between what was promised and what is possible. “I will now come every day” lasts about three weeks, then guilt begins, and after guilt, silence.

The working framework is simple. One person, not five. One fixed slot a week or every two weeks. A partner, so that you can fall ill without disappearing. And an honest list of what you do not do: you are not a nurse, not a psychotherapist and not a cash machine.

This is roughly how it works in organisations that deliver help by hand. At the Real Help charitable organisation helpers deliver groceries and medicine every month, a hundred people are in the fund's care, and a full month of care for one person costs ≈ $111, with sponsors chipping in together. The point of such a structure is not the heroism of one person but that the load is shared and so does not break off.

When you come every Wednesday for two months, the person rearranges their week around it. Wednesday becomes the day worth tidying the room and getting out the cups for. Your silent disappearance in the third month reads not as “he is busy” but as “I am no longer needed”.

So honesty matters more than scale. Say at the start: “I can once every two weeks, on Saturday, roughly until New Year.” And say aloud when you can no longer do it. One awkward call is better than silence.

And one more thing. A one-off gift is fine too, if you called it one-off from the start. The bad thing is not “little”. The bad thing is “promised and vanished”.