THEY'RE FOCUSSED ON INVESTING FOR FAMILY

We've come a long way from the days of "how can a loving husband deprive his wife of a pressure cooker?" ads. Today, countless women have broken the glass ceiling to become effective nation-builders from being just efficient homemakers. They've achieved professional success after breaking the shackles of gender disparity. But a woman's life continues to remain contradiction-ridden in a patriarchal society like ours. The anchoring pressures to get married and have kids continue to jeopardise their career prospects. Worse, their contributions to the family's financial wellbeing are still considered secondary to that of a man's. Take these two data points, for example. One - the Moneymood 2019 findings revealed women are borrowing 20% bigger home loans than their male counterparts. Two - another recent survey of 4,500 respondents concluded only 59% women purchased life insurance policies compared to 68% men.

There's a major contradiction here. Women are no longer immune to the aspirational wave that defines our times and hence are taking the lead in investing for their family's welfare. At the same time, it seems they're not paying enough attention to secure their financial future. What can be the possible reasons behind this contradictory trend? so that their families do not bear the brunt of the financial losses brought about by their early demise.

Women are more likely to invest in property and saving for their children than buying insurance plans for themselves, in addition to taking a lead in building their family's emergency fund. The traditional mindset that ultimately the buck stops with them when it comes to taking responsibility for the household doesn't help either. Selflessness, at times, can be counter-productive too. A family's financial wellbeing will surely get hit if a major amount goes towards tackling a woman's health complication, especially when that could've been easily avoided if the woman had a health insurance plan with adequate coverage.