There is growing academic consensus that financially excluded households engage in diverse money management practices, thus contradicting a perception that they do not or cannot save or draw credit, and that they progress from informal to formal financial practices (Leyshon and Thrift, 1995; Matin et al 2002; Collins, 2005). Detailed investigations of household economies reveal the management of money outside or alongside formal banking systems through the development of ‘mix and match’ financial practices (Rutherford, 2002). These ‘diverse’, ‘informal’ and ‘alternative’ practices, as they are variously labelled, entail saving and borrowing from a range of sources and are premised upon the development of relationships with individuals, groups and institutions and a reliance upon both market and nonmarket financial services that are offered by regulated and unregulated providers (Rutherford, 1999; Ruthven, 2002; Kempson and Finney, 2006; UN, 2006; Bryne et al, 2007; Stenning et al, 2010a). Shaped simultaneously by exclusion from formal financial organisations as well as by the availability of alternative financial instruments and services that enable poor households to capitalise themselves, these practices are mediated by households’ socioeconomic status, their agency and the assets at their disposal, financial knowledge and geographies, which collectively result in the creation of distinctive ‘financial ecologies’ (Ford and Rowlingson, 1996; Stenning et al, 2010a).

While preceding chapters have focused upon the formal financial lives of migrants and predominantly focused upon banking, this chapter details their more diverse savings and credit-related practices, which rely upon unregulated market and non-market services. These practices are particularly significant in facilitating migrants’ access to financial resources, given that even while the majority of men and women are banked, their access to formal credit, and to a lesser extent, savings instruments is far less secure (see Chapter Three). Organised in two parts, the chapter begins by considering informal savings and credit-related practices, which are undertaken on an individual and one-to-one basis and range from saving cash at home, the conversion of cash savings into gold, reciprocal borrowing and lending, as well as the (limited) interactions of migrant men and women with unregulated credit providers including moneylenders and pawn brokers.