This is exactly in accordance with the theory that the chronically poor are poor because of ignorance of basic life skills (and/or because of genuinely bad approaches to life)
Here's how this really happened. This guy read Prozac nation or one of the many "Reality Books" that are populuar these days and decided, "I know, I'll go talk to publishers and see if they'll pay for a book like this based on my experiences."
He found a publisher, then went to get some "experience" to write about. End of story. Yet another pretentious pseudo experiment which teaches nothing about life other than if you come up with a good enough concept, some publisher somewhere will pay you to write about it.
If the article is true, this man turned $25 into an apartment, a truck, and $5,000 in savings in under a year. It shows that it can be done, at least for a single random sample. I hope that the fact that he wrote a book about his experience doesn't prevent people from seeing the result of the experiment.
IMO, most poor people are not mentally stable and living on the edge tends to unbalance them even more. Take an educated person with zero mental of physical issues who is willing to do without TV, Drugs, etc and they can climb out of poverty quickly. However, for whatever reason many don't so saying they can leave does not let us understand why the bottom third of our nation is so marginalized.
I'm saying it probably doesn't help, and I can think of a couple situations where it would hurt.
1. You interview two relatively equally qualified candidates for a job. One is desperate for a job; he is broke and has a few days of food left. The other knows there are other opportunities out there for him, and has an emergency credit card in his pocket. As a result, the second is more relaxed and confident, and can talk to you as an equal. Maybe the first is a pressure player and would rise to the challenge, but assume he's not--you can tell he's desperate for the job. Who do you hire?
2. The same people now have similar minimum wage jobs. They make ends meet, but just barely. The situation sucks and they want to look for a better one, but taking time off for job hunting is likely to get them fired. In other words, it could land them back in situation 1. This is a greater risk for the first person than the second.
I don't know whether this is a major or minor factor. It's probably a complex issue. Still, I don't see that the guy in the article overcame poverty. He just won in a poverty simulator.