Your Grandmother Was a Financial Genius (Even If She Never Had a Bank Account)
She never owned a credit card, but she knew how to stretch, save, secure, and survive. This essay revisits the invisible financial intelligence of grandmothers across cultures, and why modern systems refuse to call it genius.
OPINION
Kavya Malhotra
1/23/20263 min read
She Didn’t Have a Bank Account — She Had a System
Your grandmother probably never invested in stocks.
She didn’t know what a mutual fund was.
She may not have signed a single financial document in her life.
And yet—somehow—
The family ate.
The children were educated.
The crises were handled.
The house ran.
The gold was hidden.
The emergencies were survived.
If that’s not financial intelligence, what is?
The problem isn’t that women like her didn’t understand money.
The problem is that we only recognize money skills when men perform them in offices.
Survival Is the Oldest Financial Skill
Across cultures—India, Africa, Latin America, Europe—grandmothers were the original risk managers.
They knew:
How long grain would last in a bad monsoon
Which assets could be sold quietly
How to save without being noticed
How to plan for disasters no one talked about
Economist Amartya Sen once pointed out that women in traditional households often managed “scarcity economics”—making decisions where margins were razor-thin and mistakes were fatal.
That’s not budgeting.
That’s elite-level financial strategy.
Gold Under the Mattress Wasn’t Naivety — It Was Mistrust
Let’s talk about the most mocked “investment strategy” of all time: gold jewelry.
Modern finance loves to laugh at it.
No compounding. No liquidity. No spreadsheets.
But here’s what gold offered women:
Ownership they could physically control
Assets that survived war, migration, and collapse
Wealth that couldn’t be frozen by banks or seized easily
Your grandmother didn’t trust institutions because institutions never protected her.
Turns out, she was right.
Informal Finance Runs on Women
Long before fintech apps and neobanks, women ran informal financial systems.
Chit funds.
Rotating savings groups.
Borrow-lend networks.
Community credit circles.
The World Bank estimates that informal savings groups involve hundreds of millions of women globally, often outperforming formal banking systems in reliability.
No interest rates.
No penalties.
No lectures.
Just trust, discipline, and memory.
Try building that with an app.
She Knew the Value of Invisible Labor
Your grandmother understood something capitalism still refuses to price correctly: unpaid labor keeps economies alive.
Cooking wasn’t “just cooking.”
It was cost control.
It was nutrition planning.
It was time management.
Childcare wasn’t instinct.
It was human capital investment.
As economist Nancy Folbre puts it:
“Care work is the backbone of the economy, yet it is treated as if it were worthless.”
Your grandmother knew better—even if the system didn’t.
Financial Literacy Was Denied — Not Absent
Let’s be clear: many women weren’t taught finance on purpose.
They were excluded from education.
Locked out of legal ownership.
Discouraged from asking questions.
Told “men handle money.”
And yet, they learned anyway.
Quietly.
Observationally.
Strategically.
Author bell hooks once wrote:
“To be silent is to be complicit — but silence was often the only survival strategy available.”
Silence didn’t mean ignorance.
It meant adaptation.
The Irony of Modern “Empowerment”
Today, we tell women to:
Learn investing
Build wealth
Be financially independent
Great. Necessary. Long overdue.
But here’s the irony:
Modern finance rarely acknowledges that women have always been financially intelligent—just under hostile conditions.
We’re not starting from zero.
We’re reconnecting to a lineage.
What We Lost When We Dismissed Her Knowledge
When we mocked traditional wisdom, we lost:
Community-based resilience
Long-term thinking
Ethical restraint
Crisis preparedness
We replaced it with:
Over-leverage
Hyper-risk
Individualism
“Too big to fail” disasters
And somehow, women are still blamed for being “risk-averse.”
Funny how caution is mocked—until everything collapses.
The Femonomic Reframe
Your grandmother didn’t lack financial literacy.
She practiced financial intelligence without permission.
She didn’t optimize for returns.
She optimized for survival, dignity, and continuity.
And maybe that’s the kind of genius we should stop ignoring.
Because if the system crashes tomorrow, it won’t be spreadsheets that save us. It’ll be the skills we were taught to dismiss.