After having established the mutually generative relationship between disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms in constructing asset norms and interviewees’ discursive engagement with these, this section will reveal how discourses are translated into everyday financial practices. The goal is to discover if and how households adopt norms of conduct – defined as developing a diversified asset portfolio guided by finance rationality (Pellandini-Simanyi and Banai, 2021) – and thus impersonate characteristics of capitalists and non-capitalists at the same time (Weiss, 2015).

If workers have moved closer to becoming capitalists by being investors, it should be reflected in accruing capital income from a highly diversified asset portfolio (Martin, 2002; Allon, 2014). Consequently, and as constructed in the political and media discourse, everyday investors should not predominantly rely on ‘passive’ financial products (Lai, 2016b, p 38) and instead should actively engage with riskier investments such as bonds, stocks and shares and investment portfolios. To achieve financial growth, they embrace risk as an opportunity and adopt financial strategies similar to companies, such as diversification and hedging, thus internalizing finance rationality (see Chapter 2). In contrast, the characteristics of labour can be seen when interviewees do not enjoy the same investment possibilities available to capitalists and adopt self-disciplining mechanisms to achieve asset accumulation. This is the case when households overly rely on low-yielding, illiquid forms of wealth, that is, if they do not diversify their asset portfolio, do not hedge against future income losses and restrict their everyday life to achieve asset ownership. For this reason, this chapter will first uncover interviewees’ asset strategy before highlighting in the next chapter its impact on everyday life.

In this context, examination of households’ asset composition, combined with the analysis of the semi-structured interviews, gauges the extent to which households have actually been empowered and how far they have adopted a financial calculus into their financial practices. Taking data from the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS), and incorporating insights from semi-structured interviews, provides an overview of households’ balance sheets while simultaneously disclosing the motives behind financial decisions.