“Nobody Should Know I’m Doing Wealth-Tech”: The Rise of Personal Finance [Wealth-Tech] and the Struggle to Stay Middle-Class in South Korea

• In Event: 158. South Korea, Twenty Years after the Financial Crisis of 1997

Abstract

This paper examines the rise of popular investing in Korea after the IMF crisis of 1997. The IMF crisis sparked a boom by deregulating financial markets and disrupting secure employment. Thrown into a context of economic restructuring and flexible labor, the Korean middle-class—who had previously enjoyed upward mobility through wage labor—has been pressured to enact financial self-management, or what is known as ‘wealth-tech’ [chaeteku]. Wealth-tech became an everyday term after the IMF crisis, referring to techniques of personal finance and money-management, including investment in stocks, funds, and real estate.

I ethnographically explored a group of laypeople who bonded together to learn wealth-tech. They are a cohort group [referred to as ‘The Cohort’ hereafter] of the most successful wealth-tech seminar offered by a local financial ‘guru.’ I carried out participant observation as well as individual in-depth interviews over ten months in 2014-2015. My ethnographic engagement included monthly study meetings at which the members shared knowledge on wealth-tech and/or discussed which stocks to buy; gatherings; informal conversations over drinks; and a holiday group trip. By looking at how The Cohort consolidates the belief that finance can make you rich, I map out their struggle to remain middle-class while learning wealth-tech. Their struggle can be seen as a response to the paradox of the post-IMF-crisis era: the pressure to take care of one’s own financial security amid job insecurity and sociocultural judgments against money and speculation that prevail in Korean society.

Author

• Bohyeong Kim, University of Massachusetts Amherst