How GoFundMe can affect your FEMA eligibility

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

With the LA wildfires still burning, we were left with a lot of questions. Today, we answer two of them: whether GoFundMe campaigns could interfere with receiving federal assistance and how much of those "proceeds" from special product sales actually go to wildfire victims.

Related episodes:
After the fires (Apple / Spotify)
Why is insurance so expensive right now? And more listener questions (Apple / Spotify)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:11.8	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
0:13.8	I'm Whalen Wong here with Daryan Woods.
0:15.9	Hey, Daryan.
0:16.8	So often on the show, we do listener questions, but today is kind of a twist on that idea,
0:22.4	because we actually had our own questions.
0:25.2	We have questions.
0:26.2	And our questions are about the LA wildfires, because as we were reading around, there
0:30.8	were some curious things that popped up that we wanted to look into.
0:33.7	Yeah, so, for example, victims of the wildfires are understandably going to go fund me to raise money.
0:39.7	But warnings are going around that getting donations that way could make you ineligible for federal assistance.
0:46.0	We get to the bottom of that one.
0:47.5	And we explore what it means when brands say they're donating proceeds of sales to wildfire relief.
0:53.3	We will have answers for you and for us after the break.
0:59.4	This message comes from Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies.
1:04.2	Sending or spending money abroad, hidden fees may be taking a cut.
1:08.4	With Wise, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market
1:12.6	exchange rate. Visit wise.com. T&Cs apply. This message comes from Monday.com. Work management
1:20.0	platforms. Red tape, endless adoption time, IT bottlenecks, and after all that, nobody really uses
1:26.7	them. But what if you didn't hate your work platform?
1:29.9	What if you actually loved it?
1:31.6	Monday.com work management platform is different.
	...

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