Diarist 23

Diarist 23 in the year to July 2025:
Status: husband, father, household manager Household size: 4 (he. wife, 2 sons)
Occupation: barber. Education: he and wife, grade 6
Major assets: house and homestead plot
Net income year to 2025: 179,464 taka (USD 1,496 PPP$ 5,586, or PPP$ 3.83 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 13,473 taka, Loans 48,800
main worry about his family, May 2025: educating my sons is expensive and good schools aren't available

Diarist 23 is a serious man who is a self-employed barber in rented premises. He and his wife both completed primary school and they have two sons: his mother lived with them until she died, unexpectedly, in 2022. In the pre-Covid period he barely covered their costs, and he had to give relatively large rent advances to landlords, for example when he changed premises in 2016 and when the landlord made improvements in 2019 (during which Diarist 23 was obliged to shut up shop for a while). His best months were the festival months, when men of both religions tend to smarten up with a haircut and shave and he often works through the night.

During the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 he had to close the shop (in 2020 the landlord let him off one month's rent), and he started visiting clients in their homes. With the children now a bit older they decided that his wife should work: she started at a mosquito coil factory in June 2020 but disliked it and swapped to a garments factory job which she still has. As the chart shows, that made them more secure financially. They have been able to finance first a refrigerator, then a rebuild of their kitchen, and they were also able to give his mother a decent funeral. When his mother died they found her unspent national pension payment hidden under her pillow.

Diarist 23 in his shop

Diarist 23, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Diarist 23 has been given a few small gifts - none of them more than 3,000 taka - from family. He has given more than he has received, mainly for family occasions and for pujas at the temple (they are Hindu). But these gifts have not been very important to their money management.

Diarist 23, chart 02, gifts

Loans

But they have borrowed frequently: we recorded 46 loans in the period we have been tracking them. The biggest ones - the biggest 20, for example, valued at 815,000 taka altogether - were from MFIs. His wife has had accounts at MFIs BURO, DSK, and Grameen Bank. He himself borrowed from the Co-operative and also took 13 howlats, the biggest of them 20,000 taka. Loans were repaid on schedule - altogether we recorded 1.468 separate repayments, totaling almost 1.2 million taka.

The loans were used for a mix of purposes. Some went directly into his business, such as financing rent advances, and some less directly, as when he used one MFI loan to pay off another. Some loans went on sickness, some went to relatives.. Some went to repay his mother who, though she lived with him, didn't contribute to the household expenses but lent him money from her unspent pension income. When his mother died his wife joined the MFI DSK to get a 60,000 loan to help withe expenses. On some occasions they took MFI loans simply because they were available, and ended up storing the money at home and watching it diminish as they made repayments out of it. Other loans were 'pushed' at them by the MFIs who saw them as reliable borrowers.

Diarist 23, chart 03, loans

Savings

At the MFIs his wife has saved into their compulsory schemes (but hasn't used their accumulating plans). In our data we can see when she joined the MFIs from the dates of the first deposits: she already had an account with Grameen Bank when we started, and she still does (she saves 100 taka most weeks). She joined BURO in early 2018 and again is still with them, again saving 100 a week. She joined DSK in August 2022 in order to get a loan for her mother-in-law's funeral, but left a little over a year later, having paid off the loan.

His mother also had an account at Grameen, but she closed it in January 2019, and took away their biggest single withdrawal of savings, of 18,600 taka.

Diarist 23 himself has had a Cooperative account into which he deposits almost daily when the officer calls. He withdraws smallish amounts quite often from these savings, for random needs including making MFI loan repayments.

All in all, savings played a smaller role than loans in their money management.

Diarist 23, chart 04, savings

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