Middle Income Group Of Urban India And Assessment Of Its Wealth Generating Capabilities.

Abstract

Urban middle income household is in constant stress related to saving and investment in assets providing good returns in long run considering their constant increasing cost of living. This paper focuses on the middle-income savings for their emergency and achieving its investment goals. Saving provides short term security and liquidity, whereas investment provides long term wealth generation. Study covers Urban household from various categories of employment namely salaried, self-employed, and business class individuals, who faces day to day challenges in having trade-offs in their financial decisions due to increase in cost of living and Inflation. Research tries to explore the recent national trend and survey-based analysis to find out the frequency of savings, proportion of income saved, their preference of different financial instrument for the investment and to check whether it generates future wealth or not. Paper even tries to focus on barriers like disposable income, risk taking capacity of investors, lack of trust in the financial instruments, limited financial knowledge of investment and constraints related to digital access for the investment. Where traditional studies analyses saving and investment pattern separately, paper focuses on proportion of household saving diverted towards the long-term wealth generation considering the importance of availability of technology related to Finance, SIP, savings behaviour, digital inclusion and trust in shaping investment decisions.

Findings of the paper aims to provide detailed insight about the evolving financial behaviour among the urban India household post pandemic, where it is found that household practices safety and cautious behaviour in investment at the same time participation in format markets is increasing.,