Wealth Compass
Dear Reader,
A client came to see me earlier this year. A retired Army officer, twenty-two years of service followed by twenty years in the corporate world, disciplined saver throughout both careers. He had come in for what he called a routine review. He wanted to make sure everything was in order before his daughter’s wedding.
We spent the first forty minutes just trying to understand what he owned.
An EPF account from his first corporate employer twenty years ago, never transferred, balance unknown. Three LIC policies, two of which he could not immediately find the policy numbers for. A PPF account at a branch in a city he had moved away from eight years earlier. Mutual fund investments spread across eight to nine different fund houses. A fixed deposit that had matured eighteen months ago and rolled over automatically into a savings account at 2.5%. Two demat accounts, one of which he had not logged into since 2019.
He had been investing diligently for over four decades. He had no consolidated picture of what he owned, where it was, or what it was worth today.
When I asked him whether his wife knew where everything was, he paused. That pause was the real answer.
You’ve Spent Years Building Wealth. Do You Have a Clear Picture of It Today?
Most Indian investors have spent decades accumulating assets and almost no time organising them. The result is a financial life scattered across multiple banks, insurers, fund houses, employers, and post offices that nobody, including the investor, fully understands. Consolidation is not a housekeeping task. It is a wealth-building discipline. And it is one of the most important gifts you can give the people who will one day depend on what you have built.
My client’s situation is not unusual. It is the norm. Most investors accumulate assets the way they accumulate memories. One at a time, in different places, without a filing system. An FD at a branch near the last posting. A mutual fund through a colleague’s recommendation. An insurance policy from a neighbourhood agent. A PPF account transferred from a parent. Each decision was sensible at the time. Together they create a financial landscape nobody can read clearly, including the person who built it.
Every job change, every city transfer, every new bank or agent adds another layer. After forty-two years, even a meticulous investor can find themselves unable to answer a simple question: what do I actually own?
This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of organisation. And it has real financial consequences that compound just as silently as the assets themselves.
Fragmentation is not just inconvenient. It is expensive.
The Reserve Bank of India reported unclaimed deposits across scheduled commercial banks at over Rs 67,000 crore as of July 2025. SEBI’s Annual Report for FY 2024-25 shows Rs 3,542 crore in unclaimed mutual fund dividend and redemption amounts. The LIC alone holds unclaimed maturity amounts and survival benefits waiting for policyholders or nominees who never came forward. This money exists. It belongs to someone. In many cases that someone is a disciplined investor who simply lost track.
This money exists. It belongs to someone. In many cases that someone is a disciplined investor who simply lost track. In other cases it belongs to a family that did not know the asset existed.
Insurance policies bought and partially forgotten are often not reviewed for adequacy. A term policy bought at 35 for Rs 50 lakh that was adequate then may be dangerously insufficient at 55.
The cost of not knowing what you own is not theoretical. It is measured in rupees, every single year.
This is the conversation most investors avoid. Consider what your family would face if they had to locate all your financial assets without your help. No master list. No consolidated statement. Just whatever documents they can find in drawers and folders, plus whatever they remember you mentioning.
Most families in this situation discover assets months or years after the fact. Some never discover them at all. Bank accounts in branches in cities the family no longer has connections to. Insurance policies with nominees who predeceased the policyholder. Mutual fund folios linked to email addresses nobody can access. Demat accounts with shares that continue to sit there, technically owned but practically inaccessible.
The pain this causes families is not primarily financial. It is the exhaustion of navigating bureaucracy while grieving. The guilt of not knowing whether everything has been found.
A nominee listed ten years ago may no longer be the right person. A WILL that has not been updated since a child was born may not reflect your current wishes. A joint account that made sense when it was opened may now create complications. None of this is inevitable. All of it is preventable, with one afternoon of organised effort and a single document your family can find and follow.
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The consolidation audit is a structured inventory of everything you own, organised in one place and accessible to at least one trusted family member. Start with these categories.
The goal is a single document, the Family Financial Binder (physical or digital), that lists every asset, every account number, every nominee, every login, and the contact details for the institution or adviser managing each one. This document should be stored securely and its location known to at least one trusted family member.
The consolidation audit will surface assets that have been held not because they are performing a useful function but because selling feels complicated, or because the loss feels too visible, or simply because nobody ever reviewed them. These assets fall into predictable categories.
The decision to exit is always harder than the decision to hold. Selling crystallises a loss or a disappointment in a way that simply holding does not. But the purpose of the consolidation audit is not to make you feel better about what you own. It is to make your financial life actually work better. Sometimes that requires letting go.
Not everything at once. Three specific, achievable steps to start the process.
My client left our meeting with a list of eleven things to do. He came back six weeks later having done nine of them.
- Found Rs 4.2 lakh in a matured FD he had forgotten about.
- Transferred two old PF accounts totalling Rs 8.7 lakh into his current account.
- Surrendered two LIC endowment policies delivering returns well below inflation. The surrender value went straight into a diversified mutual fund portfolio.
- Consolidated mutual fund holdings from nine fund houses down to three, eliminating significant overlap he had not been aware of.
- Sold a plot of land that sat idle for eleven years, generated no rental income, and whose appreciation had not kept pace with inflation in real terms.
- Sat down with his wife and showed her where everything was for the first time in their married life.
He said it was the most productive six weeks of financial work he had done in forty-two years.
📈 Financial Planning, 2026
The UDGAM Portal. How to Check If Any Unclaimed Bank Deposits Belong to You.
The Reserve Bank of India launched UDGAM, Unclaimed Deposits Gateway to Access Information, as a centralised online platform that allows registered users to search for unclaimed deposits and inoperative accounts across multiple banks in one place. Bank accounts and fixed deposits that have not been operated for ten years are classified as unclaimed and transferred to the RBI’s Depositor Education and Awareness Fund. The money continues to belong to the depositor or their legal heirs. There is no time limit on claiming it.
As of July 2025, over 8.5 lakh users had registered and accessed the UDGAM portal. The portal covers 30 major banks accounting for over 90% of unclaimed deposits in India. Using it takes less than five minutes and is completely free.
The action this week. Run a search in your name, your spouse’s name and your parents’ names. A family that moved cities, changed banks, or lost track of old fixed deposits may find funds they did not know still existed. The search takes five minutes. The money could be yours.
📄 Mutual Fund Planning, 2026
MF Central. One Platform to See All Your Mutual Fund Investments in One Place.
Most investors who have been investing in mutual funds for more than five years have folios spread across multiple fund houses, opened at different times through different channels. Each folio exists independently. Without a consolidated view, it is almost impossible to know the full picture of what you own, what it is worth today, and whether your portfolio as a whole is doing what you need it to do.
MF Central is a joint initiative of CAMS and KFintech, the two largest registrar and transfer agents for mutual funds in India. It provides a single platform where investors can view all their mutual fund holdings across all fund houses linked to their PAN. It also allows investors to trace inactive and unclaimed folios through the MITRA platform launched by SEBI in February 2025. Beyond viewing holdings, MF Central allows investors to update KYC details, change bank mandates, update nominee details, and request a Consolidated Account Statement across all fund houses in one step.
The action this week.
🎯 Wealth Management, 2026
Physical Assets vs Financial Assets. Why the Shift Gives You Control, Savings and Simplicity.
Physical assets have been the backbone of Indian wealth for generations. Gold jewellery. Property. Land. These assets feel permanent and tangible. But tangible does not mean manageable. For most investors, physical assets are the hardest to monitor, the most expensive to hold, and the most complicated to transfer.
A Gold ETF or a gold mutual fund gives you exposure to gold prices without paying GST on purchase, without making charges that can run to 20 to 30% of the gold value, without storage risk, and without the need for hallmarking or valuation at the time of sale. You can buy or sell in minutes from your phone and check the value at any moment.
Real estate, historically the most illiquid of all assets, now has a financial equivalent through REITs, Real Estate Investment Trusts, which allow investors to hold income-generating commercial real estate through units that trade on the stock exchange, with rental income flowing as regular distributions and the entire holding manageable from a phone.
Financial assets are easier to monitor, cheaper to hold, more cost-effective at the point of entry, and significantly easier to transfer to the next generation. They sit on your phone. They appear on your statement. They update in real time. Physical assets require physical presence at every stage of their life cycle.
The action this week.
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