The Quiet Rise of Adult Children as Financial Managers for Ageing Parents
Across urban India, a significant yet subtle shift is occurring within family dynamics. Adult children are increasingly stepping into the role of informal financial managers for their ageing parents. This transition is driven by rising fraud risks, the growing complexity of financial products, and the need to protect parental savings while respecting their autonomy.
Trigger Points for Financial Intervention
The journey often begins with a specific incident or realization. For Shubhangi Sahal in Delhi, it was discovering that her recently retired father had been sold over twenty insurance policies, many with forged signatures and incorrect contact details. This episode forced her to become her parents' financial manager, involving filing complaints with insurers, approaching the insurance ombudsman, correcting KYC records, and tracking down misplaced paperwork.
"I realized how exposed they were," Sahal explained. "Not because they can't manage money, but because the system around money has become complicated and risky."
Similarly, for Abhinav Singh in Gurgaon, the trigger was recognizing patterns from his professional life. His father, a retired public-sector employee, had investments in fixed deposits, corporate debentures, and occasional stock trades. Singh noticed how inflation could erode poorly structured savings and felt a fiduciary responsibility to intervene when a substantial retirement corpus arrived in 2016.
Navigating Emotional and Practical Challenges
Taking over parental finances is rarely smooth. Singh recalled early market cycles where mutual fund returns lagged behind fixed deposits, leading to jokes from his father about his "private banker son" underperforming. However, as tax efficiency and long-term returns improved, resistance softened. Today, his father encourages routing post office maturities into equity funds and uses market gains for foreign vacations.
Ajay Pruthi, founder of PLNR Investment Advisors, notes that parents often interpret children's financial advice through an emotional lens rather than a rational one. "Children push for better structures not out of greed or self-interest but because they understand inflation and fear the money may not last," he said.
Priya Sunder, co-founder of PeakAlpha, advocates involving professionals when financial conversations become emotionally loaded. "Long-standing parent-child power dynamics can make even well-intentioned advice feel threatening. When a third-party advisor suggests selling a zero-yield property, it sounds objective rather than suspicious," she explained.
Protection Against Fraud and Mis-Selling
Protection from aggressive selling and fraud is a primary reason for children's intervention. In Pune, Shantanu Nakhare and his sister stepped in before their father's 2019 retirement when agents began visiting daily to pitch endowment plans and assured-return products. They redirected the retirement corpus toward hybrid and debt mutual funds while maintaining monthly income through senior citizen savings schemes and systematic withdrawal plans.
After stopping unnecessary product purchases, they focused on operational safety. They limited UPI access to low-balance accounts, installed spam-call blocking apps, and held repeated conversations about common scam patterns. Nominees were updated across accounts, and PAN-Aadhaar linking and KYC revalidation were completed.
In Jaipur, Ravi Handa follows a conservative approach, restricting his parents' UPI usage to one low-exposure account and routing any product pitches through him. "I have not even enabled net banking for them. Any new mutual fund investments are done through old-fashioned cheques," he said. "The bigger risk isn't outright fraud. It's well-meaning relationship managers selling unnecessary products."
The Delicate Balance Between Protection and Autonomy
Protection can sometimes slide into overreach. If children take over passwords, apps, and transactions entirely, parents may lose their sense of autonomy and dignity. Pruthi describes this as the danger of invisible disempowerment. "Children can guide, sit alongside, and explain steps, but parents should remain involved in approvals and decisions. The objective is to provide support without removing agency," he emphasized.
Nakhare and Singh follow similar approaches, discussing decisions jointly and ensuring transactions occur with full parental awareness. Singh has access to his father's net banking for ease of execution since they live in different cities, but both share visibility across investment platforms. "I have also opened a separate trading account for him with limited exposure to manage his stocks craving," Singh added.
Sunder notes there is no universal template. Some parents prefer delegating responsibilities due to feeling overwhelmed by modern finance, while others want full control over spending and only outsource technical tasks like taxes or compliance. "The balance should be driven by the parents' comfort and capability, not by the child's desire for efficiency or optimization," she said.
The Unspoken Challenge of Estate Planning
While children are increasingly managing investments, paperwork, and digital checks, estate planning remains a difficult conversation. "When children mention wills, parents don't hear financial prudence, they hear death," Pruthi observed. He suggests shifting the conversation toward paperwork hygiene, explaining complexities like unclaimed deposits, fixing nomination errors, and simplifying accounts.
For Handa, this resistance has meant finding indirect ways to reduce future complexity. Instead of focusing on a will, he has gradually simplified investments and assets, persuading his parents to sell an unoccupied house in Jaipur's outskirts. "It took time to convince as these are slow conversations. But they move the needle meaningfully," he said.
Handa keeps a meaningful portion of his parents' corpus in equity despite most advisers recommending debt for those in their late 70s. "Their pension comfortably covers regular expenses, and I maintain liquidity through debt and arbitrage funds. The remaining capital is long-term money that will eventually pass to me and my sister," he explained.
Formal estate planning, however, remains off the table for many families. Sahal, Nakhare, and Singh all report struggling to move conversations beyond operational clean-up into formal estate planning, highlighting how deeply entrenched discomfort around inheritance and mortality remains in Indian households.
