Walk into a Naga household and you’ll more often than not, find gold. Pieces collected slowly, lovingly, over the years. The special chains and jewellery wrapped in boxes. Every wedding, every feast becomes a reason to add just a little more to the collection. Mothers gift theirs to their daughters, daughters save theirs for their own children. Gold isn’t just an asset for us; it is emotions, it’s tradition, and security all rolled into one shiny yellow metal.
Here’s a gentle question to reflect on: if our homes hold so much gold, then why isn’t our financial security stronger?
The Problem With Gold That Never Gets Sold: The answer lies in how we treat gold. We don’t invest in gold; we hoard it. Gold moves through generations, accumulating but never realizing its value. Think about it. You buy gold at Rs. 50,000 per 10 grams in 2020. Five years later in 2025, it’s worth Rs. 1 lakh. That’s a 100% gain, which sounds impressive. But, it’s locked in a vault, earning you nothing in the meantime. You can’t pay your bills with it. You can’t use it to generate more income. And if you’d invested, that same money in equity mutual funds or even in your own education or business, the returns could have been far higher, plus you’d have the flexibility to use the gains along the way.
Gold sitting in your locker is dead money. It doesn’t grow your wealth unless you sell it. And we almost never sell gold. We only do so when we’re desperate and have run out of all other options.
Compare this to how investors treat gold. They buy it when prices are low, sell when prices are high. They trade it. They use it strategically as part of a diversified portfolio. For them, gold is an investment. For us, it’s an emotional anchor we refuse to let go of.
The Cultural Lock: Gold becomes “wealth we cannot touch.” But this emotional attachment comes at a cost. While the gold sits idle, opportunities pass by.
We love gold, but are we loving it right? We treat it as an heirloom when we should treat it as an asset. Until we learn to see gold as something to be bought and sold strategically rather than hoarded sentimentally, it will remain beautiful but unproductive wealth.
We can still honor its meaning and also understand its value. Owning gold is not the problem; not knowing how to use its worth is.
That’s why conversations around financial awareness matter today. We need spaces where we can learn how to use our savings, emotional, cultural, and practical, in ways that support our future. Moneybar was built for this very purpose, to help us talk about money openly. Not to tell us what to do, but to help us understand what we could do.
Sometimes, the key to security is not in what we keep, but in how we choose to use it.
Paweii Kayina Founder,
Moneybar
Tuesday, March 3, 2026