The Money Conversation I Had With My Mum That Changed How I Think About Everything

I was 12 years old and I had been reading about compound interest. I understood it conceptually — the idea that money earns returns and those returns earn returns, and over time the numbers become genuinely surprising. I understood it the way you understand something in a textbook.

So I asked my mum: why didn't you start investing earlier?

The question came out more bluntly than I intended. And what happened next was something I didn't expect. She went quiet. Not the quiet of someone who doesn't know the answer. The quiet of someone for whom the question has touched something real.

She said: nobody told me I was supposed to.

What she meant

My mum is not someone who lacks intelligence or capability. But she grew up in a world where the financial decisions in a family were made by the men — by fathers, then by husbands. Not because anyone explicitly said women shouldn't manage money. It was just understood. The conversation about investing, about where money went and how it grew, wasn't one she was included in.

By the time she was earning her own salary, she had never been taught to think of that money as something to build with. She saved. She was careful. But investing — the intentional, compounding kind — wasn't something she thought was for her. Not because she was excluded. Because she had never been included.

Nobody told me I was supposed to.

Why that sentence became the foundation of Finance Matters

I have thought about that sentence a lot in the two years since. Because it contains the entire problem in six words.

Financial literacy for women and girls isn't just about teaching the mechanics. It's about the prior question — who is this information for? And for too long, in too many households, the implicit answer has been: not you.

Finance Matters exists because of that conversation. Because I don't want the girls who come through our programme to be 40 years old, sitting with their daughter, and having to say those six words.

What my mum taught me that she doesn't know she taught me

Since that conversation, my mum has started investing. She uses Groww. She has a SIP. She reads about mutual funds with the same focused attention she gives to everything she decides matters to her.

It took one conversation. One question from her 12-year-old daughter that was blunt enough to make her stop and think. And then she just did it.

What she taught me is this: the barrier is almost never capability. It's almost always the story we've been told about whose responsibility this is. Change the story and the capability was there all along.

What I want you to take from this

Have the money conversation with the women in your life. Not as a lecture. Just as curiosity. Ask your mum, your aunt, your older sister: what do you wish you had understood about money earlier? What do you wish someone had told you?

The answers will tell you more about what financial literacy actually needs to do than any curriculum I could design.

And if you're the mum reading this: it's not too late. It's genuinely never too late. The best time was twenty years ago. The second best time is right now.

What is the money conversation you wish you could have with someone in your family? Tell me in the comments.

— Anaya Deshmukh, Daughters of India