THE MONEY ISSUE

Nita Menezes has spent 30 years watching smart, accomplished people hand their financial futures to someone else. She is done watching.

BY SANGEETA RELAN | THE ABOUTHER SHOW · SEASON 3

She wanted to be a doctor. She studied the sciences, sat the exams, had the plan. Then she made one investment in the wrong place and lost every rupee she had earned. It stung. But it also redirected her entirely. Nita Menezes decided she would become a different kind of doctor. A financial one.

Thirty years later, she has sat across from more than 20,000 families. Surgeons. Founders. Senior executives. Women who run budgets for entire corporations but have never once looked at their own. What she has seen, across all of them, is the same quiet confusion. Earning a lot of money and knowing what to do with it are not the same thing.

“A higher income does not assure you wealth,” she says. “I have seen people with very high salaries, working for 30 years in great jobs, who have nothing to show for it. Not because they spent recklessly. Because their money was sitting still.”

“Financial literacy is just the syllabus. Financial agency is the graduation.”

NITA MENEZES

There is a Ponzi scheme behind her own journey. She lost her savings to it. And instead of running from the subject, she ran toward it. She needed to understand money. How it moved, what it feared, what it needed to grow. She built a career out of that urgency, and she has never really stopped.

The Problem Nobody Is Naming

Ask Nita what holds most people back and she will correct the question. It is not a knowledge problem, she says. People have access to information. They can read, search, watch, learn. The problem is something else entirely.

“People buy products without knowing what that product is doing for them. They do not even know what they want their money to do for them.” She pauses. “When I used to ask clients, what is the purpose of your money, they would look at me and say, I have never thought about that.”

One of her clients, a surgeon, had 20 life insurance policies. His chartered accountant, who happened to be his patient, had sold them to him over the years. When Nita reviewed the portfolio, none of the policies adequately covered his life. None were beating inflation. He did not know this. Nobody had told him.

“You can be literate. You can have a PhD. And still not have financial literacy.”

This is the gap she keeps returning to. Educated does not mean financially educated. Awareness is not the same as action. Knowing a formula from school is not the same as understanding why time, not rate of return, is the most powerful variable in wealth building.

The compound interest formula most of us learned has a component called N. Number of years. Nita says most people fixate on the R, the rate of return. They chase schemes and returns. They miss the point entirely. Start early, let it sit, resist the urge to pull it out when things feel uncertain. That is the strategy. Not complicated, but almost no one does it.

The Three Mistakes That Keep Repeating

After all these years, the patterns are consistent. She sees the same three mistakes across most high earners, and she names them without hesitation.

The first is confusing income with wealth. A large salary feels like security. It is not. It is potential. What you do with it determines everything else.

Also Read: She Chose Herself. Again and Again.

The second is delegating strategy along with execution. You can hand over the paperwork. You should not hand over the thinking. “You can delegate execution, but not the strategy of your own financial freedom. Each person is unique. Your goals are unique. You need to be part of building the plan.”

The third is not knowing what financial freedom means to you personally. For some people, money is security. For others, it is freedom of movement. For others still, it is the ability to stop working when they want to. None of these answers is wrong. But if you do not know which one is yours, you will never build toward it.

“Being financially smart is about execution. It is about strategy. And it is about lifestyle design. When these three things come together, that is when you are truly financially smart.”

NITA MENEZES

Why Women Keep Handing It Over

This is where the conversation gets personal.

Nita has spoken to women who are CFOs of companies. Women who manage hundreds of crores for their employers. Women who are surgeons, lawyers, senior partners. And a significant number of them do not handle their own money. They hand it to a husband, a father, a brother. Sometimes a son.

She does not blame the women. She blames the industry.

“The financial planning industry was built by men, for men.” She says this without drama. “When advisers would come home to speak to women clients, they would throw jargon at them. IRR. YTM. PMS. And these women would feel intimidated. They would think, maybe someone else should handle this. And they would step back.”

But she also traces something deeper. The conditioning begins young. In many households, money is simply not a topic for women. Not out of cruelty, but out of habit. A habit that has been passed down, quietly, for generations.

“Even today, I know women who were told, get educated, go to your husband’s house, let your father decide. That language shapes you. And then you carry it into your 40s and 50s and wonder why money still feels like someone else’s territory.”

“Women are wired differently. We think long-term. We understand emotions. If we are taught how to invest, we are better investors. Statistics back this up.”

What Changes When She Decides to Own It

Last year, Nita ran her first cohort through Nucleus, a programme she built for women between 40 and 60. Six women, five weeks, a physical space where they sat together and unpacked money from the beginning.

On day one, they did not know each other. There was a lawyer, a banker, a senior VP, a woman who had taken 15 years off for her children, and a trailing spouse who had relocated from the US and felt completely lost when it came to money. They came in feeling alone in their confusion.

By the second week, they had realised something important. The woman who had worked in a corporate for 30 years had the same gaps as the one who had taken a break. The senior executive had not invested meaningfully either. Nobody in that room had done it right. And that realisation, that it was not personal failure but a shared and systemic gap, changed everything.

“They started looking forward to every Saturday,” Nita says. “They came with questions. They started talking to their children about money. One of them came back and told me, Nita, my children want to thank you. Because after this, she helped them open bank accounts and start their SIPs.”

The confidence, she says, is the thing you cannot manufacture in a classroom. It comes from understanding. And once it arrives, it does not stay in the finance folder. It walks into boardrooms. It changes how women hold themselves in conversations. It gives them the thing they did not know they were missing: the power to choose.

“When women start making their own financial decisions, they become much more confident. They can walk not just into their homes but into boardrooms with a different presence.”

NITA MENEZES

The Conversation She Wants to Change

If she could change one thing about how we talk about money in India, especially with women, it would be this.

Stop treating financial literacy as enough. Knowing is not doing. Reading a book about swimming does not mean you can swim.

“Take charge of your financial life,” she says. “Not just financially literate. Financially smart. There is a difference and that difference is your life.”

She is working on a second book now, this one for young adults. Because they have the one thing her generation wishes it had used more wisely. Time. The N in the formula. The variable that makes everything else work.

She also has a June cohort open. Online this time, which means anyone can join from anywhere. She is not waiting for the industry to change. She is building around it.

Nita Menezes lost her savings once to a bad decision. She built a career on making sure other people do not lose theirs to no decision at all. There is a difference between those two things. She has spent 30 years explaining it.

Time to listen.

KEY TAKEWAYS

1 Income is not wealth.
A high salary is potential, not security. What you do with it is what builds something lasting.

2 Do not delegate your strategy.
Execution can be handed off. The thinking about your goals, your life, your money cannot be.

3 Know what financial freedom means to you.
Security, choice, flexibility: it means something different to everyone. Name it before you build toward it.

4 Time is the most powerful variable.
Not the rate of return. Starting early and letting money grow is the strategy most people overlook.

5 Build your safety net first.
Six to nine months of expenses as an emergency fund, adequate health cover, adequate life cover. Then invest.

6 Confidence follows understanding.
Women who own their financial decisions do not just feel better about money. They show up differently everywhere.

7 Start now, whatever now looks like.
Forgive yourself for not starting sooner. Then begin. Better late than never is not a cliche when it comes to compounding.