How to retire like a Soviet person: informality, household finances, and kinship in financialized Kazakhstan

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

What motivates financially savvy and well‐to‐do Kazakhstanis to invest in illegal financial products peddled by informal financial consultants? This article examines how such consultants capitalize on citizens’ discontent with the state and its management of the financial sphere and position their products as means of achieving socialist‐era security through Western financial technologies. By attending to the emergent space between idealized socialism and capitalism, this article grounds finance in kin relations, gender inequities, and local economic and political histories and explores how socialist conceptions of retirement and money management are reimagined and practised in relation to state‐led financialization.