Financial Risk Tolerance: The Case of Older Chinese in Klang Valley, Malaysia 2020

Abstract

Ageing demographic profiles pose challenges to the nation as policymakers are concerned about the health, public pension and the financial management of the society. In Malaysia, retirees are mostly dependent on savings from the Employees Provident Fund (EPF), a government agency that manages savings and retirement plans for private-sector employees and non-pensionable public servants. Many Malaysians aged past the targeted retirement age of 60 years old chose to remain in the workforce, mainly due to insufficient retirement funds or has depleted their retirement funds in a short period. To ensure sufficient funds to attain an ideal retirement life, Malaysians resort to invest or seek business opportunities. Thus, this paper studies the impact of demographic characteristics (sex, age, and educational level) and finance characteristics (financial knowledge and financial satisfaction) on the risk tolerance among older Malaysian Chinese in the year 2020. The results of this study showed that the older Malaysian Chinese risk tolerance is highly influenced by sex, age, education level, financial knowledge and financial satisfaction.