About
The brains behind the data.
Filtercoffee2Finance is a one-person research effort that grew out of a simple question — why does money mean different things in different homes?
Saarang Balaji
Founder & Lead Researcher
Saarang is a high schooler at PSBB Senior Secondary School, K.K. Nagar, one of Chennai's most respected institutions. He first became curious about economics and how money actually works at a young age — noticing how differently his own family and neighbors talked about saving, spending, and gold, compared to what he read in textbooks.
That curiosity turned into Filtercoffee2Finance: a project to record real conversations with South Indian households and turn them into rigorous, data-backed research — treating everyday financial habits as seriously as any market.
He now leads every part of the project himself, from conducting interviews at The Chennai Lab to transcribing and analyzing the data behind each finding.
Why this project exists
Most economics is written from a distance. Filtercoffee2Finance starts instead from the kitchen table — asking families directly how they think about gold, savings, and spending, and letting the data reveal patterns that formal statistics often miss. It's a student's attempt to take his own culture's relationship with money seriously enough to study it properly.
Get in touch
Questions, mentorship offers, or an idea for the research? Saarang would love to hear from you.
Contact the project