A study on motives for savings of salaried individuals in Odisha

Savings behaviour is crucial because of the close relation between savings and growth. Savings behavior means the manner in which an individuals or households act and reacts to the process of savings. It is well established in the literature that saving motives are directly tied to saving behavior. A variety of motivations encourages the desire or the will to save. Hence, in order to study and identify the various motive of savings, present researcher have brought together sample of 300 salaried individuals from twin cities of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar by adopting stratified random sampling technique. The present study analyses the motive for savings with respect to gender, age, education, income and identify the main motive of savings. Children's education and marriage emerged as top motive for savings, which does not support “saving for retirement” as propounded by Life Cycle Hypothesis and “saving for emergency” as found by NCAER Survey (2007). However, other motives for savings are precautionary/emergency/contingency followed by retirement, purchase of land/construction of house, income tax benefit, and purchase of consumer durables, improving life style, gifts/social ceremonies, wealth creation and businesses.