Are you a spender or a saver? It may be in your genes, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that genes have much more influence on people's wealth and saving habits than their upbringing.
Stephan Siegel, associate professor of economics at the University of Washington, studied data from Sweden on 30,000 identical and fraternal twins.
Using information from the twins' tax filings, Siegel calculated how much of their income they had saved and how much money they had invested in risky asset classes.
Identical twins, who shared a complete set of DNA, were found to share twice as much of their tendency to save money as twins born from separate eggs.
While parenting can make a big difference to people's financial behaviour when they are young adults - it accounts for about 20 per cent of the variation when they are under the age of 30 - it vanishes to almost nothing when they reach middle age, 'The Times' reported.
Between 10 and 15 per cent of the variation in how people save can be explained through a range of socioeconomic factors such as age, gender, education, income and health.
The rest of the differences are thought to be down to people's different experiences in life.
This also holds true of risky investments on the stock market, researchers said.
When the Swedish twins' holdings were compared to each other, only 3 per cent of the differences were calculated to be due to their social status, while the effect of their upbringing was negligible.
Genetic differences, however, accounted for 28 per cent, according to Siegel.
"Each individual is born with a genetic predisposition to a specific savings behaviour, an effect that is found not to disappear later in life," Siegel and Henrik Cronqvist of the China Europe International Business school wrote in the Journal of Political Economy.
"Parenting contributes to the variation in savings rates among younger individuals in our sample, but its effect has decayed significantly for middle-aged and older individuals; that is, parenting does not have a lifelong impact on their children's savings propensities," they wrote.
