Over the years, I have come across people who genuinely surprise me.
A schoolteacher with fifteen years of steady income who has never invested a single rupee. Not because the money is not there. Because nobody around them invests, and doing something alone feels too risky to begin.
An event planner earning well for a decade, saving diligently, watching the money sit in a savings account. Knowing it should be doing more. Waiting for certainty that never quite arrives.
A government officer, twelve years into his job, paying premiums on three insurance policies he cannot explain. He bought them because an agent came and it seemed like the responsible thing to do. He has never read a single document.
The Hidden Money Blind Spot
These are not careless people. They are not unintelligent. In many cases, they are the most accomplished people in any room. And yet when it comes to money, something shifts. The confidence disappears. Decisions get made backwards: first the purchase, then the panic about how to fund it. Expenses accumulate without being tracked. Conversations that should happen between partners, between parents and children, simply never begin.
This is not a women's problem or a men's problem. It is a human problem. But for women, something additional happens. The discomfort that most people carry around money, the vagueness, the avoidance, the sense that someone else will handle it, converts into something heavier. It becomes fear. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of being judged for not knowing. Fear that money is a domain that was simply never meant for them. And fear, when it sits long enough, becomes a wall.
This column has always been about the places where money conversations stop. Today I want to go somewhere we have not been yet. Not to a product or a number or a strategy. I want to go to the beginning. To where the wall was built.
What Is Your Earliest Memory Of Money?
Not a financial question. A human one. Go back, if you can. Perhaps it is watching your mother count notes at the kitchen table at the end of the month, her face tight with a calculation that never quite added up. Perhaps it is the feeling of being handed money for a school trip and being told, very carefully, not to lose it. Perhaps it is overhearing a conversation about something your family could not afford, a conversation that stopped the moment you walked in. Perhaps it is the pride of your first earned rupee, or the shame of wanting something and being told no.
Whatever that memory is, it is not just a memory. It is the beginning of your relationship with money. And that relationship, formed before you understood what money even was, has been quietly shaping every financial decision you have made since.
This is what nobody teaches us. We learn mathematics in school. We learn history, science, sometimes even economics. But we are never taught to examine our own emotional relationship with money. We inherit it instead, unexamined, from the people who raised us, from the households we grew up in, from the fears and the silences and the values that surrounded us before we could articulate any of them.
And Those Inherited Patterns Have Real Financial Consequences
A boy who grew up where money was never discussed keeps his finances private even from his wife, and they make decisions in the dark, discovering too late they were pulling the same rupees in different directions. A girl who watched her mother hide savings from her father learns that secrecy feels like safety, even when it costs her. Someone told repeatedly that wanting more is greedy may spend their adult life ensuring they never have too much.
And here is what that looks like in rupees. A woman who believed that safety means keeping everything in a fixed deposit did exactly that for fifteen years. She felt responsible. But while her deposit earned four to five per cent annually, inflation was running at five to six per cent. Her money was not growing. It was quietly shrinking in real terms. Not because the market failed her. Because a story she inherited, that safety means stillness, cost her fifteen years of compounding she can never recover. The story was not a fact. It was a belief. And beliefs, unlike market conditions, can be changed.
From Avoidance to Action
Changing them happens in three stages. The first is awareness: seeing the story you were living by. The second is examination: asking honestly whether it is true, or whether it simply arrived with your childhood and was never questioned. The third is replacement: consciously choosing a different story and building new behaviour from it. This is where a fixed deposit becomes a SIP. Where avoidance becomes engagement. Where fear becomes, over time, confidence.
This column has been building the conditions for that journey. Here is where it begins for you.
Write down three sentences, completing each one honestly and quickly, without editing yourself.
Money is...
People who talk openly about money are...
When I think about investing, I feel...
The responses that arrive first are usually the truest. Sit with what comes up. Ask where it came from. Ask whether it is still serving you.
That question, asked honestly, is the beginning of the third stage.
Next week, I want to share something personal. My own story. I hope you will stay for it.
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Stay tuned to read more such stories on Her Zindagi.