Move over FDs! Parents tutored by children looking at other investment options
mutual funds (MFs). Hesitant at first, Shalini quickly came around when she saw Palak’s dizzying investment returns.
Approaching one’s parents for financial advice is nothing new. However, here was a twist: Shalini is Palak’s mother.
“Parents only understand LIC and fixed deposits (FDs). Everything else is too risky,” says Palak, 32, who works as a brand manager with a fashion label in Gurugram and started investing in stocks during the pandemic. “My mom still doesn’t have complete faith in equities but is investing small amounts through SIPs.”
Parents have long held the responsibility of instilling savings’ habit in children. Their advice typically ranges from buying insurance policies to taking home loans. However, when the Covid-19 pandemic saw stock markets soaring, small investors flooded the market. Some of them started investing in stocks while others chose the MF route. A few others soon got their parents to invest.
Arnab Deb, 25, has been regularly investing in MFs since the pandemic. When his father retired last year and wanted to park the corpus in FDs, the Bengaluru-based engineer decided it was time to speak up. “My father was not very keen on MFs but after seeing the kind of returns I had made, he agreed to invest the lumpsum in equity.”
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Investment advisors say children taking on the mantle of investing family money is a new phenomenon, which started after Covid and has picked up over the past one year. Many
