The US Financial Diaries track the daily finances of low and moderate-income households over a year. The households faced substantial swings in income from month to month. On average, they experienced 2.7 months when income fell more than 25 percent below average, and 2.7 months when income was...

Poverty is typically measured as insufficient yearly income or consumption. In practice, however, poverty is marked by seasonality, economic instability, and illiquidity across months. To capture within-year variability, we extend traditional poverty measures to include a temporal dimension....