Personal Finance Survey is an initiative by D91 Labs to understand the financial choices made by people in India. The survey questionnaire was designed and circulated in April 2020. A total of 452 responses were recorded. The survey was conducted during the month of April 2020 during the lockdown.
In this article, we’ll talk about the insights we gathered from the survey with respect to expenses, savings & investments.
Expenses
Most people spend less than half of their income. Very few people track their expenses on a regular basis. MS Excel is the most popular expense tracking tool.
What our respondents said:
I used Monito for the longest time, but somewhere lost track because I had to manually add everything. Eventually uninstalled.
I spend only through credit card and use my credit card statement to track my expenses.
Food, rent and travel are the top 3 expense categories for most people.
Most people find it difficult to track their expenses due to the lack of a suitable tool. A lot of people do not feel comfortable giving an app access to their SMSs because of which they end up adding their expenses to the app manually — which is difficult to do regularly considering the number of times an individual transacts daily.
Savings & Investments
Most people save at least 25% of their monthly income. A lot of people having 2 bank accounts use one for their expenses and the other one for savings. They fix a monthly budget and transfer that amount to their expenses account and the rest is saved for emergencies and investments.
60% of our total respondents invest in mutual funds. Only 11% have invested in gold and 6% have invested in real estate.
Most of our respondents earning less than 5 LPA like to park their money in a bank account. For all other income ranges, mutual funds and deposits are popular investment products.
*We can’t derive insights on gold and real estate investments for income ranges because the sample size is too small.
Since 79% of our respondents are millennials, most of them started investing only less than 2 years back.
36% of our respondents say that their investment style is high risk and high return.
Most people started their investment journey by reading online blogs, books and watching finance related videos. Also, there are very few people who go with their bank agent’s recommendations.
Most people make investments towards their retirement and travel plans.
Most of our respondents say that either they do not have enough money to make an investment or they do not have the knowledge to make their own investments.
A lot of people say that they would need less than 10 crores in their bank account if they wanted to retire tomorrow and continue the same lifestyle they have at present. Since 41% of the respondents invest in their retirements, a lot of them opt for NPS, PPF and SIPs to secure their future.
Read the other parts of the analysis here:
Credits:
Questionnaire designed by Dharmesh Ba & Soumitro Datta
Analysis & Visuals by Geetika Shukla
Read our research series
About D91 labs
This research was executed and documented by D91 Labs. D91 Labs is an open-source initiative by setu.co to help Bharat build great fintech products. We organize and publish user research, insights, and frameworks for fintech in India. Please follow us on medium for more exciting stories and insights on Bharat.
Psst! We are looking for collaborators and contributors to D91 labs. If you are interested, please drop your details here, and we will reach out to you.
