Andreea Vîlcu is a Romanian freelance journalist covering social inequity.

She started working in journalism when she joined DoR (Decât o Revistă) in 2018 – an independent longform media outlet based in Bucharest, Romania. In 2022, she published a personal essay about growing up with debt and how this shaped her relationship with money in her adult life. The topic is still largely taboo in Romania, where talking openly about income, loans and debt goes against a long-standing cultural habit of keeping money-related conversations private. When the magazine closed at the end of 2022, she joined the Romanian national newspaper Libertatea until the autumn of 2024. She has also been part of the organizing team of the international storytelling conference The Power of Storytelling since 2019.

But financial vulnerability has always remained in the back of her mind. Against the backdrop of rising inflation — which in 2025 reached the highest level in the EU for a moment — she began researching the podcast Prea Sărac (“Too Poor”) in the summer of 2025, alongside former DoR colleagues. Prea Sărac was launched in October 2025, as a six-episode audio series about the struggles of getting by in Romania today. Especially after a hard 2025 marked by political uncertainty and austerity measures that hit the most vulnerable category of people: students, mothers, minimum-wage workers and the working class at large, most of them living just one emergency away from personal bankruptcy. Through Prea Sărac, Andreea — the reporter and host of the podcast — wanted to start a necessary conversation about the shame and guilt that the daily stress of scarcity creates in people’s lives. And hopefully the conversation will build more solidarity and the feeling that you're not alone.

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