A 58-year-old client has just lost her husband. She receives Rs 1.4 crore of insurance, holds Rs 60 lakh in funds and needs Rs 70,000 a month. How do you approach the first meeting, and what do you do with the money in the first six months?

Secure first, understand second, decide last, and make nothing irreversible for six months. In the first meeting, listen, confirm she has cash for the next year and take over the paperwork. Park the Rs 1.4 crore in a liquid fund, move Rs 8.4 lakh to her bank, and leave the existing funds alone. Her spending is about 4.2% of Rs 2 crore a year, so the long-term plan can wait until she can take part in it.

Nobody buys a car the week after a funeral, and if a salesman turned up with a brochure you would show him the door. Yet that is what the land-selling relative and the bank are doing. The first meeting is not for investment decisions; it is for making her safe, which means listening, confirming that money for the next year is in her hands, and taking the paperwork off her. Ask what she needs this month, not what she wants from the money over twenty years. The answer to the second question will change as the grief does, and a plan built on this month's answer will be wrong.

Her wish to settle everything quickly is the thing to handle most carefully. It is a wish to stop feeling anxious, and the honest reply is that the money is already safe, so there is no deadline. A client in the first months after a bereavement is the easiest person in the market to sell something to, which is exactly why a good adviser slows things down.

Put the numbers in front of her, slowly. She spends about Rs 8.4 lakh a year. Rs 1.4 crore in a liquid fundA debt fund holding very short-term instruments, usually under 91 days, so its value barely moves and money is available in a day. at an assumed 6% earns about Rs 8.4 lakh a year, roughly her whole spending, before touching the Rs 60 lakh of existing funds. Her spending is about 4.2% of Rs 2 crore, a rate the money can carry for decades, so six months of parking costs her nothing she will ever notice. Say the limit too: 6% is an assumption, and the liquid fund's return will drift with short-term rates; the point is that it is steady, not that it is high.

Four things, each of which someone will propose. No annuity or pension plan yet: it locks the capital for life at today's rates before anyone knows what income she needs. No property: it is illiquid, needs managing, and the relative's plot may be a favour to the relative. No lump sum into equity: a 20% fall in month three would frighten a first-time investor out of markets for good. No loans or gifts to family, however deserving, until the plan exists. Every one of these may be right in a year; none of them can be undone if it is wrong, and that asymmetry is the whole argument for waiting.

By month four you know her real spending, her health cover, any debts of his, and whether she wants to help her son or keep it all. Then you can show the trade-off. If Rs 2 crore sat entirely in deposits and debt funds earning an assumed 6% while spending rose 6% a year with prices, it would last about 24 years; at a blended 8.5% from roughly 35% equity it lasts about 35 years, past any reasonable life expectancy. That is the case for some equity, about Rs 67 lakh of the money beyond the year of spending, moved in over twelve months so that a 30% fall costs about Rs 20 lakh of a plan she understands, not a shock to money she thought was safe. Tax on debt and equity funds differs and changes; confirm the current rules before the mix is fixed. And the existing Rs 60 lakh of equity and hybrid funds gets reviewed as part of this, not sold in month one because it was his choice rather than hers.