The impact of the crisis in Spain helped to harden the difficulties of a large number of households
in Spain. Even though these conditions had a widespread impact, it has been more acute in
families that prior to the crisis were dealing with difficult situations. The main objective of this
paper is to identify strategies the households developed in order to face these difficulties. The
results have been selected from a qualitative analysis of 34 excluded household´s life stories. From
this analysis two interesting results were obtained: On the one hand, households have developed
prevention and survival strategies. On the other hand, the study identifies the consequences of
the strategies and their impact in terms of household´s social integration. With all the results,
the paper invites to reflect on the limits of survival strategies.