Diarist 01

Diarist 01 in year to March 2026:
Status: widow. Household size: 1. Occupation: market helper. Education: none. Major assets: none.
Net income in year to March 2026: 7,275 taka (USD 60, PPP$ 227, or PPP$ 0.60 per day per person): Income in kind: occasional pieces of bread etc given by market traders
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 61,896 taka, Loans 0
Main worry, May 2025: I have no house and my sister-in-law behaves badly to me, so I am anxious to get somewhere else to live

Diarist 01 is an unschooled woman now in her 50s who has been twice widowed, on both occasions losing husbands whom she did not choose but who were thrust on her by her brothers who wanted to avoid the responsibility of caring for her. We told her story (under the name 'Radhu') in a blog from 2018 entitled 'Tracking Transactions, Understanding Lives' (see thumbnail), where you can find more detail about how she spent her time and her money.

She has one daughter, who married in mid 2021. Before that, mother and daughter lived in very small hut in Diarist 01's brothers' compound. Diarist 01 now lives there alone. She earns her living by doing odd jobs in the market place. Her household income is the lowest of all 60 Diarists.

Tracking Transactions, Understanding Lives.pdf

Our first chart shows her income (in pale green) and spending (in pale blue), month by month, from May 2025 to March 2026. The resulting balance for the month is shown in the black-bordered stacks.

Her monthly income hovered around 1,000 taka and never exceeded 3,000. But for the most part she kept her spending within these limits. As a result she was able to go for months on end 'living within her means' (no matter how constrained that living has been).

Diarist 01, chart 01, showing more than ten years of income and expenditure

Her earnings are almost all from the daily trips she makes to the market, where she carries water for stallholders, sorts vegetables, or helps the Hijra community as they extort gifts from the stallholders. Stallholders sometimes give her crusts of bread for lunch. She misses days when it rains heavily or she is in poor health. She has been overlooked by the welfare state and gets no benefits. Her Gross Earned Income includes (as it does for all Diarists) the small cash reward, of less than US$ 1 each week, that we give for participating in the Diary project. She is the only Diarist for whom this tiny amount represents a sizable part of their income. For example, in early 2023, soon after her daughter married, she lived expense-free with her son-in-law's family in a distant village: the chart shows five months in which her only income was this reward. Her spending is mostly on food essentials (rice, bread, dal), and cheap medicines. Her only business costs are the ferry fare across the river to the market. In 2025 she lost her work with the Hijras as the Hijra leader who befriended her died. She turned to begging, using a small statue of a Hindu god that she exhibits to her patrons: she gets some cash and also some basic foodstuffs in this way.

Diarist 01 has virtually no assets other than her savings (see below). She has no land, and lives in a tiny tin-sheet hut of little value. She has no household goods of any value, and she has very few clothes.

Diarist 01, chart 2: zooming in on weekly data

Keeping spending in line with income

We saw in chart 1 that Diarist 01 nearly always keeps her monthly spending within the limits of her monthly income.

Charts 2 and 3 show that it is the same for weekly and even for daily spending.

During 52 weeks in 2023 and 2024 there were only 3 weeks when her expenditure exceeded her income, and during 61 days in autumn 2022 there were only 3 days of excess expenditure.

Will this prove a common strategy among the other Diarists we will be examining?

Diarist 01, chart 3: zooming closer, to daily data

Gifts, loans, and savings

Despite her normal habit of keeping spending strictly within current income, there have been a few times when she made (for her) large outlays. The biggest was in mid-2021 when she spent 25,000 taka on the marriage of her daughter. How did she find the money for these exceptional outlays? Did she get gifts? Did she borrow? Has she been saving?

Gifts

In the almost ten years we have been recording her transactions, she was given 10,078 taka in cash gifts. Almost 9,000 of this came at the time of the daughter's marriage in mid 2021, from stallholders, neighbours, and the Hijra. She also gave gifts to others - just over 7,000 altogether, of which 4,000 was when her new son-in-law visited her (she thought she was lending him money for travel costs, but he never returned it). Gifts, then, have not played an important part in her money management.

Loans

Diarist 01 does not borrow. The very idea makes her nervous. The local branch of the MFI Grameen Bank once sought her out to give her one of their 'beggar loans', small, very low-interest loans designed to wean beggars off begging. The Grameen officer, needing to fulfil his quota of loans, gave her 500 taka, unasked. He never came back for repayments. Diarist 01 shrugged the event off as one of life's mysteries.

Savings

But she has always saved. When we recruited her as a Diarist in 2015 she had just over 12,000 taka in a local cooperative, accumulated over the previous 13 years. From then on she requested us to place her 'participation reward' into that account [1]. We have paid her 126 sums (usually in monthly tranches) totaling 45,800 taka. But she saves far more often - 1,332 times in total - in very small sums from her earned income, totaling 17,375 taka.
She had but one reason to save, she frequently told us: to get her daughter well-married. She said that the money she saved 'is not mine - it belongs to my daughter'. At the time of the daughter's marriage she had 57, 352 in her account. After the marraige, Diarist 01 more or less stopped saving out of her meagre daily earnings, relying just on the savings she made with her participation reward. She has told us that she is less motivated to save now that she has 'nothing to save for'. Nevertheless as of September 2024 she has 56,591 taka in her account.

[1] this is easy for us as the Diary Project is run from the offices of the Cooperative: her account was initially a 'P9' account, designed to help low-income households shift from constant borrowing to constant saving. See here for details.

Surplus savings...

Her savings behaviour is clearly seen in chart 4.

Until she achieved the marriage of her daughter she saved from her own daily income as well as from the participation reward she gets from us. After that she simply let her savings accumulate.

Diarist 01, chart 01: showing ten years of income and expenditure

What does she spend her money on?

We have seen that Diarist 01 earns very little. How does she choose to spend the little she earns, and what - inevitably - gets left out?

Her total spending (household expenditure and business costs) came to 104,982 taka over the 112 months analyzed in this page. That is $882 at current market exchange rates, or PPP$3,665.

The single biggest category of expense was all spent in just two months in 2021, on her daughter's marriage. That was 30,700 taka, or almost 36% of all her spending.

In chart 05 we set this exceptional one-off expense aside, to look at the components of her more normal kinds of expenditure.

Diarist 01, chart 05: shares of total spending other than on her daughter's marriage

28,027 taka, or two-fifths of her remaining spending, went on food. That includes 15,176 on rice, 3,565 on fish, 3,155 on cooking oil, 1,330 on vegetables, 1,212 on spices, 885 on salt, and 830 on milk. Sugars, eggs, bread and flour make up most of the rest. She also bought some non-essential food items (the 'snacks, treats, stimulants' category) amounting to 5% of non-marriage spending: these were things like biscuits, cake and tea (mostly for her daughter) and betel nut/leaf for herself (her only indulgence).

The 24% that went on transport was for the daily ferry fare to the market where she works, and comprises her only 'business cost' (these are the costs that we deducted from her gross income to arrive at her net income).

Fuel, 16% of non-marriage spending, is almost all kerosene and firewood, for lighting and cooking at home.

Clothing, at 6%, is wholly for her daughter except for a pair of plastic shoes for herself. She herself wears saris that are gifts, sometimes second-hand, from her various employers at festival times. Healthcare, at 5%, is mostly cheap over-the-counter medicines bought at pharmacies, mostly for her own use. Jewellery, at 3%, is gold ornaments for her daughter.

Things that other Diarists spend money on, but Diarist 01 doesn't, are, most notably, clothes (for herself). Meat is another - she confines herself to fish. She doesn't pay rent, since she lives rent-free in her brothers' compound: but most of our Diarists also pay no rent since they have simple homes on ancestral homestead land. She pays no fees, no interest (she doesn't borrow), no school costs, and no utilities - the one lightbulb in her hut runs off her brother's meter. She pays no TV subscription, as she watches the TV in the tea-shop next door to her home.

on to Diarist 02

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