My Observations on How North Indians Look at Money & Investing

I recently went on a trip to North India – Delhi and Rajasthan – where I observed some interesting habits people had with respect to handling their money and investing.

Of course, some of these habits/attitudes aren’t particular to the North Indians, but these still give interesting insights into the money behaviour of that lot (and I’m one of them myself).

So here are some of my observations on how North Indians generally look at money and investing…

1. Money has to be earned at all costs, because the need to spend on lavish parties, expensive clothes and cars, and impress others at family functions is on a rise.
2. Stock markets are considered some sort of a scam where you will ‘always’ lose money.
3. Despite the above belief, CNBC remains the first channel to be watched every morning.
4. Gold and property are considered safer investments than stocks.
5. People don’t invest with a plan. They ‘just’ invest whenever they have money.
6. People are more worried about what’s happening in politics than in the economy.
7. Like their driving, people are highly overconfident about their investing skills.
8. Not many are bothered about investing education, or blogs like Safal Niveshak. 🙁
9. Most believe that they ‘knew’ about the 2008 crisis (only that they did nothing about it).
10. Food occupies a greater mind share than money (the few centimeters I’ve added to my waistline is a proof). 🙂

One more important thing I noticed among people out there is, however rash they are in their driving and investing, they care a lot about the future of their dependents and thus save a lot of money (in gold, property, and stocks).

Anyways, I now invite all my North Indian readers to accept or negate these observations.

Also, all my readers from other parts of India and the world are welcome to add their observations about the way people in their regions treat money and investing. This will be an interesting exercise.