Retirement now the savings motivator
Retirement has overtaken travel and holidays as the primary motiva-tion for the first time in the Melbourne Institute household savings report's history.
Retirement has overtaken travel and holidays as the primary motiva-tion for the first time in the Melbourne Institute household savings report's history.
About 40 per cent of the 1200 households surveyed cited retirement as their prime savings motivator, compared to 39 per cent for travel.
This marks a 20 per cent increase in the proportion of people citing retirment, which stood at 32 per cent in the last survey three months ago.
But travel and holidays continue to be popular motivations for sav-ing, the report found.
In February 1998, 30 per cent of households saved specifically to fi-nance impending travel and holiday plans. This proportion rose to 39 per cent in August 1999 and ranks a close second to retirement as a main reason for saving.
The family home is still the most popular form of saving among Aus-tralians, with three in every four households owning a home or mort-gage, but the latest survey showed this ratio has fallen by 3.3 per-centage points from last quarter.
In contrast, participation rate of saving in superannuation funds ap-pears to have improved markedly in the past three months, with the proportion of superfund-saving households registering a substantial 13 per cent increase to reach a three-year high of 56 per cent. The proportion enrolling in do-it-yourself schemes also doubled in the quarter from three to six per cent of all households.
Share ownership has continued to increase as a form of investment and is linked strongly with income level. Estimates indicate that for every $10,000 added to a person's income, the probability of invest-ing in shares increases by about 10 per cent.
The data also suggests that males are more likely to put money in shares and that the more education an individual receives, the more likely he or she is to buy shares. Homeowners are also 30 per cent more likely to own shares than people renting.
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