Wealth Management in Indian Context

Indian society is going through a massive shift in terms of social, cultural and financial landscape. The changes have been more emphasized in last decade. The old rules of the game are no longer valid.The standard way of living till couple of decade back was to do a job and accumulate capital all along. The money was usually kept in Fixed deposits. When the retirement was near, invest the money on a retirement property and hopefully live on pension for the rest of life. The lifestyle used to be modest and aspirations of the society was low. There was not much influence of media and Internet. Villages were quite immune to the cities and cities themselves used to evolve slowly. The impact of consumerism of western world was very low.

Things started changing post 90's after liberalization. With foreign investment we got exposed to the foreign cultural and social notions. The aspirations started increasing. Everyone wants best for them.

Wealth Management : Managing Risk

What is Risk? We often hear that Risk has to be managed. Risk is the uncertain outcome that we have not predicted or even if we have predicted we feel that, it is too uncertain for that to happen. We all know that we are going to die one day, but we do live our life with the notion that we are going to live eternally. (On a philosophical note, if we start living with the awareness that we are going to die one day, we all will just stop living. It's also interesting to note that we do not only live our life but we try to manage the life of our grand children. A common statement in India is to earn enough so that the next 7 generation can live on what I earn. Though the fact is that there are rare seven generation who have lived comfortably, not even Mugals. The point to note here is to be realistic with what we want to achieve with our life.)

We deal with risk everyday. When we put our money while travelling at different locations, we are mitigating the risk of money getting stolen from one location. There is an old joke where a guy