The Indian Dream

My Parents bought their home when they were thirty-four years old. It was a comfortable bungalow with two bedrooms and a clinic in an upcoming locality. The house was purchased cash down, proceeds from their years spent in Bundu — a hamlet on the Ranchi/Jamshedpur highway — the kind of place in India that is neither a village nor quite a town.

Mohan and Preety had struck out on this opportunity by need and foresight. Marrying out of love and across cultures, they didn’t have much by way of an inheritance. They did, however, have an industrious spirit and medical skills — both sorely needed in a district that had yet to witness its first cesarean birth.

My parents established a successful practice, seeing patients well past dusk, while their two and five-year-olds made friends with an assortment of dogs. At fifteen rupees a consultation, they were rich — making almost a lakh a month in the early 1990s.

For my parents, and I suspect most people, money was not a primary value. Their conception of success was humanely broad. They liked being useful, appreciated gratitude, welcomed new technology, and enjoyed a rising standard of living. We had everything we needed and most of what we knew was permissible to want.

This philosophy of money served them well. We lived happy decades in that house, which grew to add a larger clinic, a second floor, two balconies, and a greenhouse on the terrace. They put the down payment on a few other apartments and let the rent service installments. My sister got through medical school and I received financial aid at an Ivy League college.

I know how lucky we were to not worry about money.

Our home was part of a gated community but our gates opened outside of the compound to all that was still Bharat. We shared the road with buffaloes on their daily herd to the riverbank and drove our cars through a slum of brickwork rooms to come home. Our house would flood in the rains. My parents’ patients came from every strata of society. I’d listen to them as I hung out in their clinics, receiving an education in hope, grief, and the sublime.

One evening, my father finished his clinic and came upstairs. He felt a quiet in his heart and collapsed.

This is when the model of his life and my mother’s became legible in spreadsheets. After his death, we pored over our finances — cash at home, money in the bank, insurance policies, mutual funds, EPFOs, IOUs, WTFs — we parsed through weeks of envelopes.

Our dad had done reasonably well with the information he had. We found physical shares of Reliance Industries signed by Dhirubhai promising a refinery in Jamnagar. There was an art fund that went nowhere. Another wanted to invest in teak saplings and sell the trees, taking some capital metaphors quite literally. There were annuities that promised to pay ten thousand rupees a month until 2080, inflation notwithstanding.

Most of our holdings were in closed-ended mutual funds or ULIPs that paid the heavy commissions to distributors. My father, at 58 years old, had been advised to live without life insurance, holding a 100% equity sectoral portfolio, that charged about 2.5% to perform significantly worse than the market benchmark.

If we live in a world where the residue of your time and agency is stored in currency, how strange is it that we upkeep that value with lame jargon, quixotic products, and bad advice? How do professionals who make complex life and death decisions for a living get bamboozled over their life savings?

It’s not as simple as the advisors (i.e., distributors) are bad guys. It was clear that they had a tough business to begin with, respected their clients, and made good faith, commercial pitches. Rather, it was the system that sells financial products like bars of soap. Instead of seeing the doctor, financial patients get sold whatever new medicine gets stocked at their local chemist.

A story like this plays out in every home across the country and beyond. There are millions of young men and women navigating multiple axes of change in a growing market economy. Many are the first in their families to have any disposable income. Who is going the advise the world’s largest cohort of new savers?

Mool’s simple thesis is that our cash economy needs financial services that are user-friendly and suited to fit unique cash flow curves. They should help people get out of debt, protect against catastrophe, and earn more on their savings. We must solve the deep design and distribution challenges that keep most Indians from being good with money.

Finance is not about how much money you have but about what you can do in the world. Banks should be advisors rather than stores of value. They should lead customers to curate a lifestyle based on their financial bandwidth, helping them navigate through good choices to meet living goals. After all, few things compound as powerfully over a lifetime as money and relationships.

My parents were lucky to have started their careers at a time when thirty-year-olds could buy houses without help and live on good judgment. For those of us starting out today, prosperity may yet lie in the Mool of things.