HOUSEHOLD FINANCIAL STRATEGIES IN SWEDEN - AN EXPLORATORY-STUDY

The paper presents and discusses some results from an exploratory stud y of Swedish households' portfolio behaviour, The results show that gr oups of households exhibit different patterns of financial assets and debts, These patterns have been called financial strategies. The study was based on a survey with 1,000 randomly sampled Swedish households. The response rate was 50.3%. K-means cluster analysis of 35 standardi sed dichotomous variables measuring different forms of savings and deb ts was used to examine the existence of different types of financial s trategies. The strategies were labelled the residual saving strategy ( 45.5% of the analysed households), the contractual saving strategy (22 .0%), the security saving strategy (14.0%), the risk hedging strategy (9.3%), the prudent investing strategy (3.2%) and 'divergent' strategi es (6.0%). Among the factors differing between the different types of financial strategies were time preferences, degree of financial planni ng and control, interest in financial matters, activity and innovative ness, attitudes towards financial risk taking, propensity to save, lif e-cycle categories, financial wealth and home ownership.