Abstract. In this paper, poor abelian groups are characterized. It is proved that an abelian group is poor if and only if its torsion part contains a direct summand isomorphic to ⊕ p∈P Zp, where P is the set of prime integers. We also prove that pi-poor abelian groups exist. Namely, it is proved that the direct sum of U (N) , where U ranges over all nonisomorphic uniform abelian groups, is pi-poor. Moreover, for a pi-poor abelian group M , it is shown that M can not be torsion, and each p-primary component of M is unbounded. Finally, we show that there are pi-poor groups which are not poor, and vise versa.