Our parents aren’t out of money; They’re out of time, but their brain hasn’t noticed it

A friend recently asked me to review her father’s finances. He’s 75, with a liquid net worth of ₹3.5 crore, but every rupee is quietly held for the generation that comes after him. Meeting him reminded me of a story.

About the author: Abhishek Kumar is part of a freefincal’s curated list of fee-only financial advisors and a fee-only India member. He can be contacted via his website, sahajmoney.com.

He finally came out in 1974, not because he saw proof, but because his old commanding officer flew in and personally ordered him to stand down. He needed someone he trusted to say the words: The war is over. You can go home.

I think about Onoda a lot, because I keep meeting people living exactly like him.

Not soldiers. Retired Indian parents with crores in the bank. Their war against scarcity ended decades ago. They won. But nobody ever flew in to tell them. So they’re still in the bunker, still rationing, still fighting an enemy that surrendered years ago.

I call it “Switch Failure” of having the money but losing the ability to spend it.

The scarcity flipped. Nobody told their brain.

To understand why a rich man chooses to suffer, you have to understand the equation his brain was wired to solve.

When our parents were young, the math was brutal: money was scarce, time felt infinite. Decades ahead, almost nothing in the bank. So every instinct got optimised in one direction of protecting the money, and spending the time. Wait eight years for a scooter. Stand in the ration queue. Repair instead of replace. Pour every spare rupee into post office certificates, school fees, a daughter’s wedding twenty years out.

They ran that equation for forty straight years so many times that it stopped being a decision and became a personality.

Then, somewhere in their sixties, it silently inverted. The corpus grew. The kids became software engineers who don’t need the money. The home loan was cleared. Money became abundant; time became scarce.

But nobody sends a notification when the scarcity flips. No alert says the war is over, come out of the bunker. So their brain keeps solving the 1985 equation in 2026 by hoarding the thing they have too much of, burning the thing they’re running out of.

How spending the wrong currency robs them

When you’re wired to protect money at the cost of time, it doesn’t just cost one AC bill. It quietly bankrupts the years that were supposed to be the reward.

They live on the interest and treat the principal like a relic. Pulling even ₹50,000 from the core feels like a sin and they never mind that inflation eats its value whether they touch it or not.

They postpone surgery to shop for a cheaper hospital. I’ve watched parents with crores defer a knee replacement for two years, hunting a better package and lose two years of mobility in the bargain. The discount usually returns as an ICU bill ten times larger.

They choose the sleeper coach at seventy. A flight feels indulgent, so they take the bumpy overnight train to save a few thousand rupees, the money they’ll never live long enough to spend, traded for a night of inconvenience.

They starve the present to feed an heir who isn’t hungry. Faded clothes, the lumpy mattress, the skipped good meal so that they can save it all for children who are already fine, and would trade every rupee to have their parents healthy longer.

And then there’s the locked locker. This part haunts me. Silk sarees found with price tags still on. Gold that spent thirty years in a vault without once catching the light. It all passes to heirs as a number on a screen while the people it was for lived their last healthy decade like ascetics guarding a treasure they were never allowed to enjoy.

You can’t lecture them out of it. You have to rewire the equation.

Tell a 70-year-old “you can’t take it with you” and you’ll get defensiveness, not change. You’re attacking forty years of identity with a quote. What works is helping their brain finally update the math. Three moves might help them :

Build them a “Joy Fund” and make it non-negotiable. Carve off a named slice of their liquid net worth, say 10%. One ruthless rule: it cannot be reinvested, saved, or left to anyone. Its only legal use is comfort on travel, good cabs, soft clothes, and a better mattress. Walling it off gives the saver brain permission. The guilt has nowhere to land because the rules were set in advance.

Shatter the “heir illusion” out loud. Most of this hoarding is love, badly aimed. So aim it. Say the actual sentence: “I want to inherit the memory of you happy and comfortable and not a bigger number in an account.” When parents register that the hoarding isn’t making their kids happier, the moral logic of the sacrifice collapses.

3/ Reclassify comfort as a health expense. Running the AC through a heatwave isn’t indulgence but a heatstroke prevention. The cab instead of the crowded bus, the orthopaedic mattress all these are investments in staying out of the hospital. Once “spending” becomes “buying more good years,” the switch flips on its own.

The richest patient in the ICU

Money is stored human energy. Our parents spent forty years converting their time, health, and effort into it as rupee by rupee. That was the right trade when they had time to spare and money to earn.

But stored energy that never gets converted back isn’t wealth. It’s just paper in a vault, waiting to become someone else’s spreadsheet.

The whole point of saving was to spend it later and for them, later is now. This is the decade where they still have the knees for the temple steps, the eyes for the view, the appetite for the good meal. Every summer spent guarding the money instead of using it is a summer that doesn’t come back.

Nobody in the history of human ambition ever set out to become the richest, most frugal patient in the ICU.

Help them spend the right currency while they still have it to spend.

Are your parents trapped guarding the money while the years slip past? And if they ever flipped the switch how they finally did it?