The Plainspeak / Family

A belief · pairs with the Peace of Mind guide

Will your money be orphaned?

When you are gone, your family cannot claim money they never knew you had, or that the law will not clearly hand them.

By 37xBetter · a banker's view

Unclaimed bank deposits alone came to about ₹87,000 crore by June 2026, and insurers held about ₹21,700 crore more in March 2024. That is not abandoned money. It is money whose owners died or forgot, and whose families could never reach it.

It happens for three plain reasons. The family did not know the accounts existed, because no one kept a record. Or there was no nomination, and claiming without one is so cumbersome that grieving families give up. Or there was no Will, so succession law decides the legal heirs, a process that can drag on for years and often splits the family while it waits.

Fixing it takes an afternoon, not a lawyer. Keep one written record of what you own and where, and make sure your family knows it exists and where to find it. Put a nomination on every account, and review it when life changes, a marriage, a birth, a death. And write a Will.

The Will matters more than people think, because a nomination is widely misunderstood. For bank accounts and most investments, a nominee is a caretaker. The law lets the nominee receive the money, but they must pass it to the legal heirs. Life insurance can work differently when the nominee is a spouse, parent or child, which is one more reason to write a Will. The Will is what actually decides who gets what. Where you can, make the nominee and the heir the same person, so the two can never be set against each other.

None of this is for you. It is the last kindness you do for the people you leave behind: that your absence does not also orphan your money.

On a bank account, a nominee is a caretaker, not an heir.