The Kenya Financial Diaries was an ambitious project designed to deepen understanding of the financial lives of low-income Kenyans by capturing all of their transactions over the course of a year, through fortnightly visits. Alongside quantitative records of money flowing into and out from the study households, interviewers recorded respondents’ stories, perceptions, and the events happening in their lives. This project – one of the largest of its kind – covered 300 households about evenly distributed across five areas of the country. It provides a new and deep view of how Kenyans get by on low-incomes and offers new insights into how they use and think about their money. These insights can be quite useful to institutions serving the poor, offering up new perspectives on how the financial barriers to saving, borrowing, health care, education, and investing might be overcome