Harnessing A Money Mindset

Most divorced women land up in financial mess due to lack of awareness.

- Yagnesh Kansara

A Mumbai-based Marwari couple filed for divorce after being married for 25 years. When their lawyer cross-examined the man about their bank account details, she was shocked to learn that there was neither a joint account, nor he had made any investments in his wife’s name. The case was handled by Mumbai’s famous family court lawyer Kranti Sathe, who also fought other high-profile divorce cases including Bollywood celebrity couples Karisma Kapoor and Sanjay Kapur and Malaika Arora and Arbaaz Khan.

This is no aberration. Many women across the country end up in such state of financial mess when they decide to walk out of a marriage. Some cases get resolved but several of them remain under litigation for years. “In a small city like Navsari (South Gujarat), we get at least three to four such cases per week. And the irony is, they are rising in numbers,” said Paresh Joshi, Practicing Advocate, Surat, Navsari and Valsad District Courts, South Gujarat.

Married women (even if they are working) suffer the most, when it comes to managing their personal finance. According to lawyers and tax experts, women should be held accountable for putting themselves in such a dire state.

Aarti Sathe, a practicing tax lawyer, said, “This is a more of a mindset issue. Most of the women I come across are of the opinion that this area (investing, financial planning, managing financial resources) is the one which they should not get into. They feel, their partners understand it better and hence, they do not question them.” It is like most men claiming that kitchen is not their forte so they don’t cook, which is again a mindset issue, she claimed.

All the women, she spoke to, are educated and come from well- off family backgrounds; some are professionals while others are homemakers. However, they all have given their partners the authority to manage their funds and assets.