What I Got Wrong Before I Got It Right

Last week we talked about the stories we inherit about money, the beliefs formed before we were old enough to question them. This week, I want to share mine.

Not because my story is extraordinary. In fact it is ordinary in exactly the ways that make it useful. I made the mistakes most Indian women make. I learned some things too late. And the clarity I eventually found came not from reading the right book or meeting the right advisor, but from sitting with some expensive lessons and deciding to understand them rather than repeat them.

I grew up in a household where money was managed carefully and quietly. My mother was extraordinary at stretching what we had. But the conversation was always about what things cost, rarely about what things could become. Saving was virtuous. Investing was for people who already had more than enough. We were comfortable, but the idea that money could work for us, that it did not simply sit until it was needed, was not part of the vocabulary I grew up with.

So when I started earning, I did what I was taught. I saved. I opened a fixed deposit. I felt responsible. What I did not do, for longer than I care to admit, is invest. The stock market felt like gambling. Mutual funds felt complicated. Gold felt safe. And so my early earning years, the years when compounding would have worked most powerfully for me, were years when my money was sitting in instruments that barely kept pace with inflation.

The first lesson I took too long to learn: caution and avoidance are not the same thing. I thought I was being careful. I was actually protecting my anxiety rather than my money. A well-structured financial life needs both stability and growth, in the right proportions for your stage of life. What I had was one at the cost of the other. And I only understood the cost when I calculated, years later, how much the stillness had taken from me.

The second lesson was not knowing what I owned. When I got married, I did not ask. I did not look. There were investments, policies, accounts, and I assumed they were being managed, that someone else had it in hand, that it was not really my domain. I was a passive participant in my own financial life without realising it, because the passivity felt normal. It felt like the natural arrangement of things.

The day I sat down and actually listed everything, every account, every policy, every investment, and asked honestly what each one was doing for me, was the day something shifted. Some of what I found was useful. Some needed to be closed. Some had been quietly costing money without anyone noticing. But seeing it clearly was the beginning of owning it. I hear this in letters this column receives too. A reader who discovered after a family crisis that she did not know where a single document was, another who realised she had never once asked what would happen to the family's money if something happened to her husband. The shame in those letters is real. And it is undeserved. You cannot manage what you have never looked at. And for too long, not looking had felt like trust when it was actually just absence.

The third lesson is the most personal. I spent years not discussing my finances with anyone. Not friends, not family, certainly not in public. Money felt private to the point of shameful. As though having it, wanting more of it, or understanding it made you somehow greedy. It took me a long time to understand that this silence was itself a financial handicap. You cannot ask good questions in silence. You cannot learn from others in silence. You cannot correct mistakes you never name. Silence is not privacy. It is a cost you pay every year you stay quiet.

These three lessons are not unique to me. They are the result of a system that never taught most of us to have a real relationship with money. Once you understand that, the shame of not knowing lifts. And in its place comes something more useful: the determination to know.

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The personal story is one part of what brought me here. The professional one is the other. I have spent fifteen years in finance. Working with investments, building portfolios, running a family office, evaluating opportunities, sitting across the table from some of the sharpest financial minds in the country. In all those years, the question I was asked most often, by women across every background and every income level, was some version of the same thing: where do I begin? Not which fund to pick or which policy to buy. Simply: where do I begin?

That question is what this column was built to answer. And it is what drove me to do something I have been working toward for a long time.

This week, before you read anything else, write down the three places in your own financial life where you got it wrong. Not the numbers. The behaviour. The thing you avoided. The question you never asked. The conversation you never had. That list is more honest than any investment statement. And it is the only place a real financial journey can begin.

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Next week, I want to share something with you that has grown from this journey. From fifteen years in finance. From this column. And from every letter you have sent in asking where to begin. Something you will be able to hold in your hands.

I hope you will be here for it.

Write to us at iamolaxmi@gmail.com. We read every letter.