The folios nobody knew about

Ramesh Kulkarni was a quiet man who took pride in being thorough. For thirty-four years, he worked in the accounts department of an auto ancillary firm in Pune, retiring as a senior manager in 2019. He maintained four fountain pens, kept his tax assessment orders from 1994 onwards in stiff cardboard files, and never bought anything on an instalment plan.

He was also an early believer in mutual funds. Long before online portals existed, Ramesh would walk down to an agent’s office on Jungli Maharaj Road during his lunch hour to hand over paper application forms accompanied by signed cheques. Later, as technology shifted, he opened accounts through a private bank portal, then through a popular mobile application, and once through a colleague’s son who had started out as an independent distributor.

Ramesh saw every investment as a quiet victory. He never discussed figures at dinner, but whenever his wife, Vidya, asked about their future, his answer was always the same: "Everything is taken care of. You will never have to ask anyone for anything."

Vidya believed him. Money was Ramesh’s department, just as managing the household and caring for his aging parents had been hers.

On a rainy Tuesday in July, Ramesh suffered a massive heart attack while waiting at a bus stop. He was sixty-six. By the time Vidya reached the municipal hospital, he was gone.

The weeks that followed were consumed by the ceremonies, relatives arriving from Solapur and Belagavi, and the numb exhaustion that accompanies sudden grief. In September, their daughter, Neha, who worked as a systems analyst in Hyderabad, took three weeks of unpaid leave to help her mother put the household finances in order.

They started with the steel Godrej almirah in the bedroom.

Inside, behind neatly folded dhotis, lay five thick folders. One contained the flat purchase deed from 1996. Another held fixed deposit receipts, mostly matured and reinvested over the years. But the investment folder was a maze. There were counterfoils of cheques from banks that had since merged. There were physical account statements printed on dot-matrix paper from the late 1990s, listing mutual fund schemes that no longer existed under those names because fund houses had merged or been bought out.

There were no account numbers written in one place. There was no master list.

Neha sat down with Ramesh’s laptop. He had left no written record of his passwords. His mobile phone, which held the authentication applications and received the one-time passwords for his email accounts, had a six-digit screen lock that neither Neha nor Vidya knew. When the local phone repair shop finally helped them reset the device after seeing the death certificate, the stored application data was wiped clean.

Neha then requested a Consolidated Account Statement using her father’s Permanent Account Number. When the statement arrived by email, it listed fourteen different mutual fund folios across eight asset management companies.

That was only the start of the puzzle.

Four of the folios listed Vidya as the nominee. Two had no nominee recorded at all, having been opened in an era when nomination was optional on application forms. Three older folios still carried the name of Ramesh’s mother as nominee; she had passed away in 2004.

Worst of all were the bank mandates. Five folios were linked to a savings account at a local cooperative bank that Ramesh had closed eight years earlier when the branch moved away from their neighbourhood. Any redemption proceeds or unclaimed dividends from those schemes were routed toward an account that ceased to exist.

To correct the bank mandates, the fund houses required a signature verification from the bank manager of the old account—a bank where the manager had changed thrice and the account records were archived in cold storage. To claim the folios without a living nominee, the fund houses requested legal heir certificates, indemnity bonds stamped on non-judicial stamp paper of specific values, and notarised affidavits signed by Neha, Vidya, and Neha’s brother, who lived in Canada.

Neha’s three weeks of leave ended. She returned to Hyderabad with a briefcase full of half-filled transmission forms. Over the next eleven months, Vidya spent dozens of mornings sitting in the plastic chairs of registrar service centres in Pune, submitting identity proofs, waiting for token numbers, and explaining to clerks that her husband had simply never mentioned which email address he used for which folio.

The money was there. It was invested in the Indian economy, growing or fluctuating with the market week after week. Yet while Vidya dipped into her modest personal savings to pay the building society maintenance and her own thyroid medications, her husband’s wealth sat frozen behind layers of verification.

Ramesh had spent thirty years accumulating assets. He had spent less than an hour considering how anyone else would access them.

The moral

An investment that your family cannot locate or claim is not an asset; it is an administrative burden. Wealth creates security only when the people who depend on it know where it sits, whose names are attached to it, and how to reach it without a team of lawyers. Simplifying records and keeping nominations updated is not mere bookkeeping. It is the only way an inheritance ever actually reaches home.