A study on household spending, savings and investments during the pandemic

The pandemic has profoundly affected the way of life and compelled us all to rethink our priorities when it comes to expenditures, savings and investments. Because of the ravaging pandemic of the COVID-19 virus and the lockdowns, the tendency on the part of households to put more funds in the form of precautionary savings/forced savings has increased significantly. This research paper aims to study and analyze the change in the financial behavior of middle class households from across India in regards with their expenditure, savings and investment activities during the pandemic. The questionnaires were circulated among middle class families to collect the required data and the data was analysed using the tools of pictorial representation such as pie charts and bar graphs and to find out the correlations between different variables the Pearson correlation coefficient was used. The outcome of the study shows that many households have seen a reduction in discretionary spending; a significant portion of the middle income cohorts observed a considerable rise in their overall savings during the period of the pandemic and have channeled their extra cash held by them towards investments of different kinds.