Romania has the lowest financial wealth per capita in Europe at 5,823 euros/person, which is less than Bulgaria (over 7,700 euros/person), Horia Gusha, president of the Association of Fund Managers, said on Tuesday during the Piața Investment Funds 2024 – Expectations and challenges”.

“We often talk about financial education or that Romanians have poor financial education. I don’t like that expression; I also worked for the French and the Austrians, I was in many countries and I noticed that we are no less educated. There is experience.

My colleague’s grandfather from France or Austria invested in the stock exchange 70-80 years ago. My grandfather had a CEC card – it was the only way to save. Therefore, we lack experience. Americans, English or French learned to invest by doing it regularly. In the 90s, Bursa also appeared here. But in the first part it was more speculation than investment. You were “playing” the stock market, not investing. It was a specification and you were trying to capture certain trends in the market. I think that such speculations are behind us, and now we have entered a phase where we already have some experience. Americans have shaped their experience and now we are seeing an astounding number of them using the 401k form.

When they’re hired, it’s a program that has a tax structure behind it that encourages them to invest for the long term, until retirement. And this is how they build their financial education and experience. In a few years, we have also reached a stage where people come to us to invest for the long term, each with the goals that they have set for themselves, and these investments will lead to an increase in the level of experience and, as a package, the level of education. Because you don’t have an education if you don’t have experience. We’ve all seen those ads on TV that tell us that too much sugar, salt, or fat isn’t healthy, or that exercise is good, something we all know. But we lack experience. The same with investments: I think education is enough, all you need is experience!” he explained on Tuesday Mihai PurkaryaCEO of BRD Asset Management

As for bank deposits, the average Romanian deposit is 7 times smaller than the European average.

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The savings of 59,500 Romanians are 100 times greater than the deposits of another 14.1 million citizens

The financial assets of the population increased significantly, correspondingly by 8 times (by 112 billion euros). They are strongly polarized, this characteristic is demonstrated by the distribution of deposits, so that 0.4% of depositors (59,500 people) at the end of the third quarter of 2022 accumulated 26% (64.6 billion lei) of the total amount of deposits of citizens who hold an average of 1.08 million lei per person, equivalent to 220,000 euros, according to the first vice-governor of the National Bank of Romania, Florin Georgescu.

At the opposite pole are 99.6% of depositors (14.1 million people), who own 74% of deposits, the average amount of savings of these people is 11,000 lei, which is equivalent to only 2,200 euros.

The cash of the population grew 12.4 times in euro equivalent (from 0.9 billion euros to 11.2 billion euros), faster than the savings of the population in banks, which grew only 9.1 times (from 6 billion euros to 55 billion euros ), the message says. Fl. Georgescu in his book about the wealth of Romanians.

National wealth per capita increased in the period 2003-2019 to EUR 32,700, 2.9 times / The EU-27 average is EUR 102,000, which is 3.1 times higher

The first EU-27 countries in terms of wealth per capita with values ​​of the indicator significantly exceeding the European average are Luxembourg – 286,000 euros, Denmark – 212,000 euros, Austria – 187,000 euros, the Netherlands – 176,000 euros and Germany – 163 thousand euros.

Non-financial assets per inhabitant

The level of these assets increased by 3.2 times (from 12,000 euros in 2003 to 38,000 euros in 2019. The EU-26 average is 100,900 euros per inhabitant, correspondingly 2.7 times higher than in Romania, we we are in the penultimate place in the European hierarchy (25th place out of 26 countries), just ahead of Bulgaria.

Luxembourg, Ireland, Austria, Denmark and Sweden take the first place according to this parameter.

See the summary of the study