Bulgarians keep their money on close to 12 million bank deposits, the Bulgarian National Bank reports. In practice this means that every Bulgarian has two bank deposits on average. There are no statistics whether deposits are kept in the same bank or in different banks. However figures suggest that in reality their number is down: a year ago it was by 3 percent higher. Overall, Bulgarians keep about 20 billion euro on their deposits, or 10 percent more cash than the same period of last year.
It turns out that Bulgarians concentrate and join together their constantly rising, though actually modest savings but they still are not running the risk of putting all eggs in a single basket. Indeed, they have a good reason to do so, especially after Bulgaria's forth biggest lender collapsed and was declared bankrupt a few days ago and thousands of depositors lost part of their savings.
In rough estimates, every Bulgarian keeps an average of 3000 euro on a bank deposit. These statistics tend to be misleading though. The reality is much different and there is no change in the fact that Bulgarians are the poorest nation across the European Union. In fact, close to 70% of deposits stand at the modest amount of 500 euro. At the opposite end of the spectrum are affluent Bulgarians, and there is hardly a sensation in the fact that deposits exceeding 500,000 euro are not more than 685.
Official BNB statistics do not reveal anything about secret deposits of rich people in foreign banks. Media often launch speculations linked to the names of top politicians, underground bosses and leading businessmen.
A million euro-strong deposit is something most Bulgarians cannot imagine given that the average monthly salary in this country is 400 euro, and the average monthly pension is 200 euro. Adding the fact that the number of employed Bulgarians is steadily decreasing and that in the last three months alone 50,000 lost their jobs, it becomes clear that solvency is quite problematic with Bulgarians.
The ambition of the new Social Minister Ivailo Kalfin to introduce a minimum hourly wage of 2 euro will hardly bring about any radical change to the picture. Whatever happens in the short term, it won't break the habit of Bulgarians to save against a rainy day, no matter how modestly.
English Daniela Konstantinova
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