I use a behavioral economic lens to examine how people facing financial insecurity decide to seek financial help. Help can broadly be categorized as being either formal (provided by an organization or professional) or informal (provided by an individual acting in a personal capacity). I focus on one particularly vital type of financial help from each of these categories: from formal help, I examine social welfare program benefits; from informal help, I examine financial loans or gifts from friends and family. I begin by presenting a general framework that outlines how a person may decide to seek any type of financial help. In the framework, a person progresses through three stages as they make this choice: identifying whether that type of help is available to them, assessing how attractive it would be if they could get it without taking action, and estimating how costly the actions required to seek the help would be. I then apply the framework separately to the formal and informal help types, each time reviewing prior literature on factors that affect people’s (un)willingness to seek that help. Finally, I discuss policy implications, arguing that an understanding of both formal and informal help-seeking processes is crucial for informing policies intended to help financially vulnerable populations.