Ask a working mother what her family’s financial plan looks like and the answer is usually a variant of the same sentence: her husband handles all that. Ask him and he’ll describe the , the term policy, the mutual fund quietly building their future. He isn’t lying. He just hasn’t noticed that her name is on none of it — that she doesn’t have the app password, has never spoken to the advisor, and if something happened to him tomorrow, would spend months locating assets that were always hers too. This is not a story about absent husbands. It is a story about a system built around a single earner, a single decision-maker, and the assumption that a woman’s relationship with money is, by design, secondary.
That assumption has a price. A woman who doesn’t understand her family’s financial position cannot protect it when protection becomes necessary. A widow who discovers — at the worst possible moment — that nominations were never updated and the term policy lapsed is not a cautionary tale. She is a preventable outcome.
“A woman’s name on a financial document should not be symbolic. It should come with understanding, authority, access, and actual decision-making power — and those are four different things.”
New mothers
The year a child is born, most families open a savings account, buy a child plan, and move on. What actually matters is more foundational: the mother’s own term insurance, updated nominations across every account, and a goal-based SIP for the child’s education started early enough to let compounding do the heavy lifting. For parents of daughters, the offers 8.2 percent guaranteed and tax-free — better than most products aggressively sold to new parents. Child ULIPs, by contrast, carry high charges and routinely underperform plain SIPs over equivalent time horizons. They are sold heavily because they are profitable for everyone except the buyer.
Working mothers
The working mother’s most dangerous financial habit is the paused SIP. It starts logically — maternity leave, reduced income, genuine pressure — and stays paused because returning to work is overwhelming and a year slips by. What looks like a small disruption is not. A monthly SIP of ten thousand rupees paused for eighteen months in one’s mid-thirties costs not the one lakh eighty thousand foregone — it costs upwards of fifteen to twenty lakh in final corpus over a twenty-five year horizon, because the units not bought during a correction are precisely the ones that multiply most. Automate the SIP before the salary lands. Treat it like an EMI: non-negotiable, not redirected in a good month, not paused in a hard one. Beyond that — should be preserved, never cashed out between jobs. NPS should be intentional. And tax planning under Sections 80C, 80D, and 80CCD is real money, not paperwork.
Entrepreneur mothers
The trap entrepreneurial mothers fall into most consistently is treating the business as the retirement plan. A business is a concentrated, illiquid asset subject to competition, health events, and market conditions outside the owner’s control. Reinvesting everything back into it isn’t conviction — it’s concentration risk in confident clothing. Business income needs to be systematically converted into personal assets that live outside the business: a diversified mutual fund portfolio, a personal emergency fund of at least six months of combined business and personal expenses, key-person insurance, and retirement savings that do not depend on the company still being viable at sixty-five. Separate accounts, separate planning, no exceptions.
Single mothers
For a single mother — whether by choice, divorce, or loss — financial independence is not an aspiration. It is the only viable condition. There is no second income to bridge a gap, no partner to absorb a setback. The emergency fund is not three months; it is nine to twelve, because recovery takes longer when one person carries everything. Term insurance and health cover are not deferrable — they are the primary protection between her children and financial instability. And the documentation — current will, updated nominations, organised insurance and investment records, written guardianship instructions — is not a someday project. It is the infrastructure that protects her children in the scenarios she most hopes never to arrive.
Senior mothers
A woman retiring at sixty in good health may live another thirty years. A retirement plan that doesn’t account for that is not conservative — it is incomplete. Capital protection alone, at four to five percent returns against real inflation, quietly destroys purchasing power over decades. A senior mother’s portfolio needs steady monthly income through instruments like the Senior Citizens’ Savings Scheme and RBI bonds, alongside some growth through hybrid funds or systematic withdrawal plans. It needs health cover with a top-up of fifty lakh to one crore rupees, because hospitalisation is the single biggest destroyer of retirement savings in India. And it needs a current will with clearly named beneficiaries — because verbal family arrangements, however well-intentioned, are not succession planning.
Across every one of these stages, the infrastructure is the same: an emergency fund that is genuinely liquid, insurance that reflects actual need, investments that are automated and uninterrupted, and documentation that is current. None of it requires a large income or a financial background. It requires a decision to begin — because the cost of delay is always higher than it looks from the present moment. The flowers this Sunday are gone by Thursday. The SIP started this week runs until 2045.
The author is CEO – Wealth, Arihant Capital Markets Ltd.
Disclaimer: For general information and investor education only. Not investment, tax, legal, or financial planning advice. Consult your financial, tax, or legal advisor before making decisions. Market-linked investments are subject to market risks. Past performance is not indicative of future returns.