Banks and institutions share a certain idea of what money is and what people have to do with it. These preconceptions structure their banking products upstream as well as their service offer to individuals. Yet, the relationship of people to money is not obvious and deserves to be investigated. Are the perception of money and its actual use in line with the assumptions of banks? These lessons come from our report on the uses of money.

Society is less likely to grant individuals the right to retire than before the “glorious thirty”: retirement is no longer an unquestionable right (because it is deserved), but a privilege to be won and claimed. This puts pressure on pensioners: they are asked to rejuvenate, to be in good health and, ultimately, to play an active role in society. This leads to the invention of the concept of “seniors”; the real model of the active retiree. But from the point of view of individuals, retirement is experienced as a crisis: work is so structuring in life that its disappearance can be difficult to handle for them, who, at the time of retirement, experience what they describe as “empty” periods. To overcome this crisis, individuals orientate their retirement in different ways: they either continue to work or turn away completely. In any case, their answer is the result of an arbitration between new rights and especially new duties.