The Hunter branch of the hotline has struggled to cope with the increase in requests, which comes following mass job cuts particularly in the mining sector.
The Hunter Manager of Financial Counselling, Wendy Maile, told ABC News that many people have been left under financial strain, as redundancy payments also prevent some from receiving financial support from Centrelink for up to two years.
"These kind of situations require us to do a lot of advocacy work," she said. "We can see in the last six months on a whole we've seen 233 new clients."
"We've actually had to stagger our books or close our books for certain periods of time to enable us to help our clients in the best way we can," she explained.
Lifeline is a crisis support organisation offering a 24 hour telephone service as well as personal and financial counselling services.