Diarist 18

Diarist 18 in the year to March 2026:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 3 (he. wife and working son)
Occupation: fisherman, then brick breaking. Education: almost none
Major assets: house and homestead plot; boat
Net income in the year to March 2026: 100,330 taka (USD 829 PPP$ 3,135, or PPP$ 2.86 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 208 taka, Loans 0
main worry about his family, May 2025: I have high blood pressure and may not be able to work

Diarist 18, now in his 60s, has been a river fisherman all his life, and his wife often does brick-breaking as well as caring for the children. When we started tracking them in 2015 their son of 12 was living with them and attending school. Two of their daughters had married and were living with their husbands. But that left three more daughters at home. Number 4 married soon after we started (an expensive affair). Number 3 is deaf, and her marriage prospects were considered poor. However, in 2021 she married into the fishing community, to a deaf man working as a carpenter. Then in March 2023 Number 5 also married. Now (mid 2025) just the son, who has not yet shown any inclination to marry, is still living at home and working as a motor mechanic.

As chart 01 shows, Diarist 18 has managed a surplus (of earned income over expenditure) most months, but with occasional big deficits as he paid out for marriages, childbirth, and home rebuilding. In later months the son began to earn more money and to allocate more of it to the household (instead of spending it as pocket money) and as a result their recent surpluses have been healthy.

Their business costs have been very small in value: he maintained the same boat and fishing gear over the years with careful attention to the timberwork and the nets. As a result, business costs barely show on our chart. But in 2023 fishing in the river turned so bad that he quit his lifelong profession and started breaking bricks. When we visited him in late 2025, his health was poor - he was unable to eat properly because of a throat problem. There are also tensions with he son, who made a sudden marriage that his parents disapproved of.

Diarist 18 on his boat

Diarist 18, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Like most of our Diarists, this household has given plentiful small gifts to temples and priests (they are Hindu) and to relations for births deaths and marriages. They have also received many small gifts. But the picture regarding bigger gifts is very simple - they get big contributions for marriages and pay out somewhat lesser amounts in dowries. This can be clearly seen in chart 02, in which the gifts coincide with the bigger inflows and outflows shown in chart 01.

Diarist 18, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Their big expenditures couldn't be easily handled with the relatively modest gifts, nor paid for out of current income. So Diarist 18 turned to loans. His wife has 'memberships' in two major MFIs, Pidim and SSS, and has borrowed from them, on and off, throughout the period. They are not the biggest loans, though. The informal howlats (interest-free local loans) are bigger. Indeed, the three biggest loans - with values of 100,000 taka or more - are all howlats. All three were taken in 2023, for home construction and marriages. The nine loans that are next-biggest in value, from 48,000 to 80,000, are all from MFIs: they were used for home construction mostly, but also a little to repay howlats, finance marriages, and to buy his son a smartphone. None were business, or 'income generating' loans, which is what MFIs advertise as the main purpose of their loans. Then there are 20 smaller loans, ranging from 200 to 40,000 taka, mostly howlats but including a few MFI loans.

Who were the lenders who provided these howlats? Without exception all were from Diarist 18's extended family: married daughters and sons-in-laws above all. The big three loans were, in order of value, from the 3rd son-in-law, the 4th son-in-law, and the 2nd son-in-law. So the children who married first provided much of the finance for the marriages of those who married later.

With the horizontal scale in chart 03 the same as in chart 01, it is easy to see the relationship between several of these loans and the household's main expenditures.

Diarist 18, chart 03, loans

Savings

They saved at both their MFIs, and at MFI SSS they saved in a DPS (the accumulating high-interest account). Recently, however, they took the DPS savings before the account matured, thereby losing some of the extra interest. This wasn't because of a sudden big need, but because Diarist 18 was beginning to find MFI loan repayment's difficult, and they decided to close the SSS account altogether.

They used three other deposit partners. Relying again on family, Diarist 18 stored money with two of his sons-in-law, using them as reliable 'moneyguards'. That worked well. The son and one of the daughters also used a local savings club (a Ghoreya) for a couple of years and retrieved a small but useful sum. The household never borrowed from the Cooperative, but they have always have had savings account there which they have tapped when needed for the marriage expenses.

Diarist 18, chart 04, savings

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