World Savings Day: Women prefer saving over investment, reveals survey

Women are active savers and are ‘recklessly safe’ when it comes to financial safety, revealed a survey by online investment service Scripbox.

According to the media release by the firm as part of World Savings Day, over a third of women who took part in the survey ended up saving 10 to 30 percent of their monthly income, while a tenth saved over half their income.

The survey was conducted in the first two weeks of October 2019 on leading Facebook Communities and data was collected from 400 women including 54 percent millennials.

As per the release, the survey discovered that women prefer safer and traditional options such as fixed deposits, recurring deposits, Public Provident Fund (PPF) or just letting it lie in their savings accounts.

"Nearly 58 percent of the women prefer to save their money, squirrelling it away in either fixed deposits, PPF or letting it lie in their savings account. 6 percent women said they preferred to buy gold, while 15 percent of women picked mutual funds to invest their excess income in,” the release stated.

Surprisingly, it is the millennial women who are more risk aversed in comparison to the general female population. As per the survey, three-fourths of millennial women overwhelmingly favour saving, while half of the non-millennials pursue investment goals such as building up a retirement corpus or setting aside funds for their children’s education.

As per the data, one reason that women prefer conventional saving option is their priority of having easy access to their money. Over 40 percent of the women said that this aspect is critical to them when they save or invest.