Sahal found herself stepping into the role of financial manager for her parents. She had to untangle the mess by filing complaints with insurers, approaching the insurance ombudsman, correcting KYC records and tracking down paperwork that should never have been wrong in the first place.
Once the immediate damage was under control, a larger task emerged: ensuring this never happened again and that her parents’ finances were properly safeguarded. “I realized how exposed they were,” she said. “Not because they can’t manage money, but because the system around money has become complicated and risky.”
Across many households, as parents age and financial products proliferate, adult children, often living far away, are increasingly becoming informal chief financial officers for their parents. From screening product pitches and cleaning up legacy investments to pushing overdue paperwork, monitoring digital risk and gently redesigning decades-old habits, children are stepping in to manage money remotely.
The role is rarely announced. It usually emerges after a scare, a retirement, or the realization that modern finance has become too complex for one person to handle alone.
When ageing money meets modern finance
For Abhinav Singh in Gurgaon, the trigger was not a single crisis but a pattern he recognized from his professional life. His father, a retired public-sector employee, had long split his savings between fixed deposits (FDs), corporate debentures and occasional stock trades. “To maximize interest rates, he invested in corporate deposits promising high returns, but sometimes the principal remained stuck.” So when a substantial retirement corpus landed in his father’s account in 2016, Singh felt a fiduciary responsibility to intervene.
“I had seen how inflation quietly eats away at poorly structured savings. If not managed properly, the money simply doesn’t compound.”
Taking over was not smooth. Early market cycles were unforgiving and for a period the mutual fund (MF) returns lagged FDs. “My father, who monitored performance almost daily, joked to friends that his ‘private banker son’ was underperforming FDs,” he recalled. Gradually, as tax efficiency kicked in and long-term returns improved, resistance softened.
Today, Singh’s father encourages his son to route post office maturities into equity funds, and uses market gains to fund foreign vacations, something he never indulged in during his working years.
This arc of resistance, discomfort and eventual trust is common, said Ajay Pruthi, founder, PLNR Investment Advisors and an RIA. “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 because they understand inflation and fear the money may not last.”
This is why conversations framed around ‘better returns’ often fail, while discussions around cash flows, peace of mind and better succession planning may land better.
Priya Sunder, co-founder and director at PeakAlpha, strongly advocates involving professionals when financial conversations become emotionally loaded within families. “Long-standing parent-child power dynamics can make even well-intentioned advice feel threatening or controlling. When a third-party advisor suggests selling a zero-yield property to redeploy the capital for a better quality of retirement, it sounds objective rather than suspicious, something the same advice from a child may not achieve.”
Why children step in: fraud, mis-selling and digital risk
Protection from aggressive selling and fraud is a major reason children intervene.
In Pune, Shantanu Nakhare and his sister stepped in before their father retired in 2019, when agents from banks and non-banking financial companies began visiting their home almost daily to pitch endowment plans and assured-return products.
They wanted to redirect the retirement corpus toward a mix of hybrid and debt MFs while maintaining monthly income through senior citizen savings scheme (SCSS) and later a systematic withdrawal plan (SWP). “There were arguments, especially since some agents were family friends. What finally helped was that my father’s trusted friend gave a positive experience with MFs.”
After stopping unnecessary product purchases, they turned to operational safety.
They limited UPI access to a low-balance account so that large sums were never easily transferable. They installed apps for blocking spam calls. Repeated conversations were held about common scam patterns and OTP sharing. Nominees were updated across bank accounts, MFs and insurance policies along with PAN–Aadhaar linking and KYC revalidation completed. “Now we have a simple spreadsheet that tracks investments and compliance timelines,” said Nakhare.
These basic hygiene checks often give more protection than complex products, said Sunder.
In distant Jaipur, Ravi Handa follows a deliberately conservative approach. He restricts his parents’ UPI usage to one account with low exposure, insists that any product pitch routes through him and keeps bank balances lean to avoid both fraud risk and aggressive sales calls.
When his father sells a stock, Handa quickly moves the proceeds into MFs rather than letting cash idle. “I have not even enabled net banking for them. Any new MF investments are done through the old fashioned cheques,” he said. “The bigger risk isn’t outright fraud. It’s well-meaning RMs selling unnecessary products.”
The autonomy dilemma
Protection, however, can slide into overreach.
If children take over passwords, apps, transactions and approvals entirely, parents can slowly lose their sense of autonomy and dignity. In extreme cases, parents end up asking their own children for access to money despite having sufficient assets.
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.”
Nakhare and Singh follow a similar approach. Decisions are discussed jointly and transactions happen with the parents’ full awareness.
Singh has access to his father’s net banking and passwords for ease of execution since they live in different cities, but both share visibility across investment platforms and track performance together. “I have also opened a separate trading account for him with limited exposure to manage his stocks craving.”
In Nakhare’s household, most compliance work and digital tasks were done together so that parents understood the systems rather than feeling excluded from them.
Sunder notes that there is no universal template. Some parents prefer to delegate most responsibilities because they feel overwhelmed by modern finance. Others want full control over spending and only outsource technical tasks such as taxes or compliance. “The balance should be driven by the parents’ comfort and capability, not by the child’s desire for efficiency or optimisation,” she said.
The conversation families still avoid
While children are increasingly taking over investments, paperwork and digital checks, estate planning remains difficult.
“When children mention wills, parents don’t hear financial prudence, they hear death,” said Pruthi. “Rather than framing the conversation around inheritance and mortality, children need to carefully shift it toward paperwork hygiene, like explaining the complexities of unclaimed deposits, fix nomination errors and simplify accounts.”
For Handa, this resistance has meant finding indirect ways to reduce future complexity. Instead of focusing on a will, he has gradually simplified both investments and assets.
He persuaded his parents to sell one unoccupied house in the outskirts of Jaipur rather than letting it pass down and dealing with ownership transfer and sale later. “It took time to convince as these are slow conversations. But they move the needle meaningfully.” Another apartment, currently occupied by a tenant, remains under discussion.
The same thinking extends to investments. Although most advisers recommend that investors in their late 70s move largely into debt, Handa keeps a meaningful portion of his parents’ corpus in equity.
“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.”
Formal estate planning, however, continues to be off the table. His parents have brushed aside the idea of making a will, telling Handa and his sister to divide assets among themselves later.
Handa is not an exception. Sahal, Nakhare and Singh say they have also struggled to move conversations beyond operational clean-up into formal estate planning, underscoring how deeply entrenched the discomfort around inheritance and mortality remains.