Click to play videoBangalore: Rajeev Chandrasekhar and his friends are upwardly mobile professionals who have seen riches at a very young age thanks to their IT jobs. They spend heavily on parties, gaming, branded clothes and accessories.
Footloose, care-free and, incidentally, heavily taxed. A survey by a private financial services company in Bangalore has found that a majority of techies don't bother to save and in fact, end up paying heavy taxes.
“We have a community called the Icom where we discuss investments. But that is all that I did, I have made no investments yet,” Chandrashekar who is a team lead at MindTree said.
Meanwhile, software engineer, Srinath said, “Everyone wants to have fun and to do that you need money.”
The survey, covering tax returns filed by more than 1,100 IT professionals from Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, found that a whopping 60 per cent of them haven't even saved the minimum of Rs 1 lakh to get tax exemption.
Worse, 84 per cent of them didn't have any medical insurance and an average 42 per cent didn't even have life insurance.
CEO, Right Horizons Financial Services Pvt Ltd, Anil Rego said, “It's something which is dangerous in my view. It's important to take the right amount of insurance because you wouldn't want the family to undergo tough times. You would want them to retain the same standard of living.”
It is believed that more than 40 per cent of the salaries go for partying. With the recession forcing companies to slash pay packets, they are beginning to feel the pinch.
Time was when parents and grandparents always insisted on putting away a few pennies for a rainy day, but given the sudden gold rush that the IT boom brought with it, not many techies believed in that logic.
Well, perhaps it's something we need to start thinking about, now that fears of lay-offs and pay cuts are becoming real.
(With inputs from Sinduja Balaji)
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