Living Transnational Financial Lives: Exploring the Everyday Financial Practices, Networks and Subjectivities of Singaporeans in Sweden

Abstract: This thesis examines the everyday financial lives of transnational migrants through the case of Singaporean migrants in Sweden. Drawing upon the scholarship on the financialisation of everyday life and transnational migration across economic and sociocultural geography, this thesis develops a conceptual framework that explores the everyday financial practices, networks and subjectivities that shape the lived financial realities of transnational migrants and how the complex and overlapping relationships between these different aspects of the financial everyday shapes the formation of the transnational financial subject. Using a process-based methodological framework that employs a combination of methods comprising of archival/library research, textual analysis and in-depth interviews, this thesis wishes to reveal the actually existing geographies of the transnational financial lives of Singaporeans in Sweden. The four main concerns that shape their everyday financial practices are their attitudes towards financial markets, concerns about the pension system, interest in property and concerns about exchange rates which shapes the ways they invest in financial markets, how they manage their pension, how they buy/invest in property and how they exchange between different currencies. These financial practices are also informed by their financial knowledge and networks which requires an understanding of where their financial knowledge networks are situated and what information are relevant in their own socio-spatial context and the negotiation of trust in the reliability of information from their overlapping personal and professional networks of information sharing/exchange. The multiple financial and migrant subjectivities as a transnational migrant also have a significant effect on the social and spatial configuration of their everyday financial practices and networks. As will be discussed in this thesis, the complex and overlapping relationships and processes that figure in the production of the transnational financial subject are always partial and incomplete, as they are situated between home and host countries, summoning and assembling their multiple financial and migrant subject positions, in the social, cultural and material production of their lived financial realities