Multi-Generational Wealth Building Through NEPSE

First published 26 Aug 2026 · Last verified 29 Aug 2026

Lesson 115.1 — Thinking in Generations, Not Just in Years

Dilip Prasad Sharma bought his first NEPSE shares in 1994, the year Nepal's stock market opened its trading floor to ordinary citizens instead of only to a handful of large institutions. He was a schoolteacher in Biratnagar then, forty-six years old, earning a modest government salary, and he put a small amount of savings into a development bank's shares because a colleague told him it was "safer than hiding money under the mattress." Dilip is ninety-one this year. His granddaughter, Ashmita Sharma, is thirty-one, an engineer working in Kathmandu, and she now sits beside her grandfather twice a month to review the family's NEPSE holdings together. Between them sits Dilip's son and Ashmita's father, Prakash Sharma, a bank branch manager in Biratnagar who inherited some of his father's caution about risk but almost none of his father's patience for reading annual reports. Three generations, one portfolio, one long story. This chapter is built around their family, because the questions they have faced are the same questions almost every NEPSE investing family in Nepal eventually faces.

Most investing books, and most investing habits in Nepal, are built around a single lifetime. You save, you invest, you hope the value grows, and you spend it in your old age. That is a useful way to think about your own money. But it is an incomplete way to think about your family's money, especially in a country where joint family structures are still common, where land and shares are often held with the unspoken understanding that they belong to the family rather than to one person, and where three generations frequently share a single household or at least a single set of financial decisions.

Think of a farmer preparing a field. If he only wants a harvest for himself this season, he plants what grows fastest. If he wants his grandchildren to eat from the same land, he also plants fruit trees that will not bear fruit for ten or fifteen years, and he digs an irrigation channel that will still be carrying water long after he is gone. NEPSE investing can be treated the same way. Some shares you buy for near-term needs — a daughter's wedding in five years, a house renovation. Other shares, and more importantly the habits and the systems around those shares, you plant for a harvest you yourself may never personally collect. A blue-chip bank share bought today and held with care can still be paying dividends to your grandchildren in 2060. But only if the "irrigation channel" — the legal and family systems that carry ownership from one generation to the next without leaking or breaking — is properly built.

Multi-generational wealth building through NEPSE, then, is not really about picking better shares than everyone else. It is about answering four practical questions, each of which we will unpack across this chapter.

First, how do you involve the next generation early enough that they are ready to manage the portfolio, rather than inheriting it as strangers to it. Second, what legal tools exist in Nepal today — particularly the nomination facility inside your Meroshare demat account — that make the handover simpler when the time comes. Third, what actually happens, step by step, when a shareholder dies and the shares must move to the family. Fourth, how a joint family can make investment decisions together without the process turning into resentment or conflict, and without one generation's inheritance later becoming ground for a family feud.

Dilip did not think in these terms in 1994. Nobody handed him a book like this one. He learned the hard way, as we will see later in this chapter, when his own father's shares became difficult to transfer after his father's death. That hard lesson is exactly why Dilip, forty years later, has already filled in every nomination form his broker and his demat account allow, and why he insists that Ashmita attend every family portfolio review rather than being told about the shares only after he is gone.

Lesson 115.2 — Bringing the Next Generation Into the Room Early

There is an old habit in many Nepali households: money matters, especially investment matters, are discussed only among the senior male members of the family, often behind closed doors, and children — sons and daughters alike — are told almost nothing until they need to be told something, usually because a parent or grandparent has died. This habit made some sense when investing was rare, when most family wealth was land and gold held quietly, and when very few people understood shares at all. It makes much less sense today, when NEPSE has hundreds of thousands of demat account holders and when financial literacy is something every young person can learn on their own phone.

Ashmita's own introduction to the family's NEPSE holdings did not happen when she inherited anything. It happened when she was nineteen, still an engineering student, and her grandfather asked her to help him check his Meroshare account because his eyesight was failing and he found the portal's small text difficult to read. Meroshare is the online portal operated by CDS and Clearing Limited, the company that maintains Nepal's electronic register of who owns which shares, that lets a shareholder view holdings, apply for new share issues, and manage account details without visiting an office in person. What began as Ashmita simply reading numbers off a screen for her grandfather slowly became something more. She started asking why he held twelve different company shares instead of just two or three. She started asking what a dividend was, why some companies gave bonus shares instead of cash, and why the price of a hydropower company's shares moved so much after the monsoon compared to the dry season. Dilip, delighted to have an audience, explained patiently, the way he once explained fractions to schoolchildren.

By the time Ashmita finished university and started her own job, she already had her own small demat account, opened with her grandfather's help, holding a handful of shares she had chosen herself after watching him for years. She was not inheriting a stranger's portfolio. She was continuing a habit she already understood.

Contrast this with Prakash, Dilip's son. Prakash grew up in a household where his father invested quietly and rarely explained his reasoning, partly because in the 1990s and 2000s there was less to explain — the market was thinner, information was harder to get, and Dilip himself was still learning. Prakash inherited a general sense that shares were "his father's hobby" rather than a family responsibility. He is comfortable with his bank job and his fixed deposits, and he still finds his father's portfolio a little intimidating, even now, in his fifties. This is not a criticism of Prakash. It is simply what happens when one generation is not brought into the process early. The skip does not have to repeat itself with the next generation, which is exactly why Dilip made a deliberate choice to include Ashmita from a young age, to close the gap that had opened between himself and his son.

There are concrete, practical ways any Nepali family can do what Dilip eventually did on purpose.

Start by simply narrating decisions out loud, the way you might explain to a child why you water certain plants in the vegetable patch more than others. When you decide to buy shares of a commercial bank because it has paid a steady dividend for ten years, say that reasoning aloud in front of your children or grandchildren, even if they are only twelve or fourteen years old. When you decide to sell a share because the company's fundamentals have weakened, explain that too. Children absorb financial habits the same way they absorb language — through repeated exposure, not through a single lecture.

Second, consider opening a small demat account in a minor's name, held and operated by a parent or guardian as required under the rules, so that even a young family member has some shares that are, in spirit, "theirs," with real money and real outcomes attached, however small. Watching ten thousand rupees of shares rise and fall teaches a teenager more about patience and risk than any classroom lesson.

Third, once a family member becomes an adult and opens their own demat account through Meroshare, treat that as a milestone worth a family conversation, not just a paperwork exercise. Sit down together and review, in plain language, what a BOID is — the Beneficiary Owner Identification number, a unique code that identifies a person's demat account, similar in spirit to a bank account number but specifically for share ownership — and how it connects to their citizenship documents and bank account for dividend payments.

Fourth, hold regular, scheduled family portfolio reviews rather than only urgent, crisis-driven conversations. The Sharma family settled into a rhythm of meeting on the first Saturday of every month, a short session, often no more than forty-five minutes, where Dilip, Prakash, and Ashmita go through the portfolio together: what shares are held, what dividends have arrived, what news has come out about the companies they hold, and whether any action is needed. This simple, boring, repeated ritual is doing more for the family's multi-generational wealth than almost any single investment decision they have made.

The purpose of bringing the next generation in early is not merely education for its own sake. It is risk management. A portfolio understood only by one aging person is fragile. If that person becomes ill, loses mental clarity, or dies suddenly, decisions must be made by people who do not know why any particular share was bought, what price it was bought at, or what the family's broader goals were. A portfolio understood by three generations, even imperfectly, survives the loss of any one member far better.

Lesson 115.3 — The Nomination Facility: The Simplest Tool You Are Probably Ignoring

Here is a plain, important fact that many NEPSE investors in Nepal do not act on even though it costs nothing and takes only a few minutes: every demat account opened through Meroshare allows the account holder to name a nominee, a person designated in advance to receive the shares in that account if the account holder dies. This is called the nomination facility. It is one of the single most useful and most underused tools available to any Nepali investing family.

Think of the nomination facility like the address label you write on a parcel before sending it through the postal service. Without a label, the parcel might still eventually reach the right person, but only after clerks open it, check its contents, ask questions, and try to work out where it belongs, at the cost of considerable time and paperwork. With a clear label already attached, the parcel moves through the system quickly, because everyone along the way already knows exactly where it is meant to go. A completed nomination form is that address label for your shares.

Nomination is different from a will, and different from ordinary inheritance law, and it is worth being precise about the difference because confusion here causes real problems for families later.

A nominee named in a Meroshare account is, broadly, the person the depository system will recognise as entitled to receive the shares after the account holder's death, which can make the transmission process considerably faster and simpler, because the identity of the intended recipient is already on record. However, nomination inside CDS and Clearing Limited's system operates within the framework of Nepal's broader inheritance and succession law, and family members with a legal claim under that law are not automatically cut out simply because someone else's name sits in the nominee field. In practice, this means nomination is best understood as a powerful administrative shortcut that dramatically eases the process, not as a replacement for a proper family understanding, and ideally a will, about how the shares are ultimately meant to be shared among heirs.

Dilip filled in his nomination form for the first time only in 2016, more than twenty years after he began investing, and he did it because of what had happened three years earlier with his own father's estate, an episode we will walk through in detail in the next lesson. He named Prakash as his primary nominee, since Prakash is his only son, but he made a point of telling both Prakash and Ashmita, in front of each other, exactly what he had done and why, so there would be no confusion or suspicion later about hidden intentions.

There are a few practical points every Nepali investor should act on immediately after reading this chapter, regardless of age or portfolio size.

Check whether a nominee is currently listed on your demat account at all. Many older accounts, opened years ago when the nomination facility was newer or less emphasised, still have no nominee recorded. If you have never explicitly filled in a nomination form, assume none exists.

If you already have a nominee listed, check whether that information is still correct. Family situations change. A nominee named fifteen years ago may have since passed away, moved abroad permanently, or the family relationship may have shifted in ways that make a different family member the more sensible choice today.

Make sure your bank account details linked for dividend payments, and your citizenship and contact details on file with your depository participant, are current. A returned dividend cheque or a bounced electronic payment because of an outdated bank account is a small but entirely avoidable headache that multiplies during an already stressful time after a death.

Tell your family, in plain words, that you have completed this step. A nomination filled in secretly and never mentioned to anyone provides only half its value. The other half of its value comes from removing uncertainty and anxiety among family members while you are still alive to reassure them.

Lesson 115.4 — When a Shareholder Dies: Walking Through Transmission Step by Step

In 2013, Dilip's father, Tul Bahadur Sharma, passed away in the small town outside Biratnagar where he had lived his whole life. Tul Bahadur had bought a modest number of shares in his seventies, in the early 2000s, after Dilip persuaded him that a bank fixed deposit alone was not doing enough to protect his savings from inflation. Tul Bahadur understood shares only vaguely, trusted his son's judgment, and never filled in any nomination form, largely because at that time bank staff rarely explained the option clearly and Tul Bahadur, in his old age, was not inclined to chase down paperwork he did not fully understand.

When Tul Bahadur died, his shares sat in a demat account with no nominee on record. What followed took the Sharma family nearly eight months to resolve, and it is worth walking through exactly why, because most families discover these obstacles only when they are already grieving and already under pressure, which is the worst possible time to be learning a new bureaucratic process.

Without a nominee, the depository participant — the brokerage firm through which Tul Bahadur's demat account had been opened — required the family to establish, through documents, exactly who Tul Bahadur's legal heirs were and in what shares they were entitled to inherit his property. This meant obtaining a death certificate from the local ward office, which is the local government administrative unit in Nepal responsible for registering births, deaths, and issuing various local certificates. It meant obtaining what is commonly called a legal heir certificate, sometimes called a relationship certificate or "naata pramanit patra" in Nepali, also issued by the ward office, which formally lists who the deceased person's legal heirs are according to family relationship — spouse, children, and so on. It meant collecting citizenship documents for every listed heir, and in Dilip's family's case, because Tul Bahadur had more than one surviving child, it meant getting written consent or a formal relinquishment from Dilip's sister, who lived in Kathmandu, confirming how the shares would be divided among the siblings, since disagreement among heirs at this stage can stall the entire process indefinitely.

Every one of these documents had to be gathered, often requiring multiple visits to the ward office, sometimes with small clerical errors in a name or date requiring a document to be reissued. Then the full set had to be submitted, along with a formal application, to the depository participant, which forwarded it to CDS and Clearing Limited for the shares to actually be transmitted into the names of the recognised heirs. Only after this was complete could the family decide, together, whether to keep the shares, sell them, or divide them among themselves.

Compare this to how Dilip has arranged his own affairs today. He has a nominee listed and confirmed with the depository participant. He has told both his son and his granddaughter in plain terms what the nomination says. He has kept his citizenship documents, his Meroshare login details, and a simple written note about which broker holds his account, together in one folder that both Prakash and Ashmita know the location of. When the time eventually comes, and Dilip is realistic that it will not be long now, given his age, the family expects the process to take weeks rather than months, largely because a clear nominee already exists on record, reducing the burden of establishing consensus among multiple heirs before the depository will act.

It is worth being honest that even with a nominee, the process is not instant, and it is not entirely free of paperwork. A death certificate and some basic verification will always be required, because a nominee is a designated recipient, not a person who can bypass every safeguard meant to confirm that a death genuinely occurred and that the claimant is genuinely who they say they are. But the difference between "weeks" and "over a year," between one visit to a broker's office and eight months of ward office paperwork during a period of grief, is entirely the difference the nomination facility makes.

Lesson 115.5 — Joint Family Decision-Making Without Losing Harmony

Nepal's joint family structure, where grandparents, parents, and adult children often share a household, or at least share close financial ties even when living separately, can be either a great strength or a great source of tension when it comes to investing. The strength is obvious: more eyes watching the portfolio, more hands available to handle paperwork, shared resources for larger investment opportunities, and the natural transmission of financial habits across generations that we discussed earlier in this chapter. The tension is equally obvious to anyone who has watched a family argue over money: different generations often have very different appetites for risk, different levels of financial literacy, and sometimes different, unspoken assumptions about who has the final say.

Think of joint family financial decision-making like several farmers sharing one irrigation channel that runs through all their fields. If everyone agrees in advance on how much water flows to whose field and when, the system works smoothly and every field gets watered fairly across the season. If there is no agreement, and each farmer simply takes water whenever he feels his field needs it most, the channel runs dry for someone downstream, resentment builds, and eventually somebody blocks the channel out of frustration. Family investment decisions work the same way. Clear, agreed rules about who decides what, and how disagreements get resolved, keep the "water" — the money and the trust — flowing fairly to everyone.

The Sharma family's monthly review meeting, described earlier, is one part of their system. But a meeting alone is not enough if it is not clear who actually has authority over which decisions. Over time, the Sharma family settled into an informal but workable arrangement, roughly as follows.

Dilip, as the founder of the family portfolio and the person whose name is on most of the older holdings, retains the final say over decisions involving his own core holdings while he is alive, out of simple respect and because it is legally his money. But he has explicitly, verbally and in writing to his son and granddaughter, invited both of them to challenge his decisions and ask questions, rather than treating disagreement as disrespect. Prakash, who is more conservative by temperament, has taken on the role of handling the practical administrative side — renewing citizenship documents, keeping records organised, dealing with the bank for dividend payments — even though he participates less in choosing which shares to buy. Ashmita, who has the most time, the most comfort with technology, and the most recently updated financial knowledge, does the research: reading company annual reports, checking NEPSE announcements, and bringing recommendations to the monthly meeting for the other two to discuss and approve together.

This division of labor did not happen automatically. It happened because the family talked about it explicitly rather than letting roles form by default or by assumption. A frequent source of trouble in Nepali households, and certainly not unique to the Sharma family, is the assumption that because one member is older, or male, or the eldest son, that person automatically has full and permanent authority over all financial decisions, regardless of who actually has the time, the interest, or the updated knowledge to make good decisions. This assumption, left unexamined, can quietly push capable family members, very often daughters and daughters-in-law, out of decisions that affect them directly.

A successful example from the Sharma family's own history illustrates how joint decision-making, done well, can outperform any single person's judgment. In early 2020, as news of a global pandemic began reaching Nepal and NEPSE's index fell sharply over a period of a few weeks, Prakash panicked and wanted to sell a large portion of the family's bank and hydropower shares immediately, worried that prices would keep falling indefinitely. Dilip, drawing on decades of having seen NEPSE fall and recover multiple times before, including during periods of political instability in the 2000s, argued for patience. Ashmita, rather than simply picking a side, suggested they look together at the actual businesses behind the shares: were the banks still collecting deposits and processing loans, was electricity still being generated and sold by the hydropower companies, had anything about the underlying businesses actually broken, or had only the price fallen. Together, they concluded the businesses were fundamentally intact, panic was driving the price fall more than any lasting business damage, and they agreed to hold rather than sell, with Ashmita additionally proposing they use some spare cash to buy a small additional quantity of a strong bank's shares at the lower price. Within about a year, the shares had not only recovered but risen well above where they had stood before the fall, and the family's decision to buy more during the dip added meaningfully to their long-term holdings.

What made this moment work was not that any one person was right and the others wrong. It was that three different temperaments and three different kinds of knowledge — Dilip's long memory, Prakash's caution, and Ashmita's willingness to dig into details — were all allowed into the room, and the family had already built the habit, through years of monthly meetings, of listening to one another rather than one person simply overruling the rest.

Lesson 115.6 — Preventing Disputes Over Inherited Shares

Even families that manage their living investments well can fall apart over inherited shares after a death, and it is worth being direct about why this happens so often, because prevention is far easier than repair once a dispute has hardened into a grudge.

The most common cause of dispute is simple lack of information. If only one family member knew the full details of what shares existed, at what value, and where the account records were kept, then after that person's death, other heirs are left guessing, and guessing breeds suspicion. A sibling may wonder whether another sibling quietly sold some shares before informing the rest of the family, even when nothing improper occurred, simply because nobody had visibility into the account while the deceased was alive.

The second most common cause is unequal treatment, whether real or perceived, especially between sons and daughters, or between a child who stayed close to the parents and a child who moved away, often for work, sometimes abroad. Nepal has an enormous number of families with at least one member working overseas, in the Gulf countries, Malaysia, or elsewhere, sending remittances home. A family member abroad who was not present during a parent's later years, but who is legally entitled to an equal share of inheritance, can easily feel shut out of decisions made entirely by those who stayed behind, even when those decisions were made with good intentions.

The third common cause is simply the absence of any prior conversation about intentions. A parent may have quietly intended certain shares to eventually support a specific grandchild's education, or may have meant certain holdings to be split evenly, but if this was never said aloud or written down, the family is left reconstructing intentions from fragments after the fact, and different family members will often reconstruct different, self-serving versions of what they believe was meant.

There are practical steps any Nepali family can take now, while everyone involved is alive and reasonably calm, that dramatically reduce the odds of a bitter dispute later.

Hold at least occasional family conversations, not only about the mechanics of the portfolio, but about intentions. If a grandparent wants certain shares eventually used for a grandchild's education, or wants the portfolio split in a particular way among children, saying this clearly, in front of the people affected, while everyone can still ask questions and register any objection calmly, prevents an enormous amount of later conflict.

Put important intentions in writing, ideally alongside proper legal advice about wills and succession under Nepali law, rather than relying purely on verbal promises remembered differently by different people afterward. A will, even a simple one, prepared with appropriate legal guidance, is not a sign of distrust among family members. It is a gift to them, sparing them from having to guess or argue about what a deceased person "would have wanted."

Keep records transparent while the account holder is alive. There is no good reason, in most families, for adult children to be kept entirely in the dark about what shares exist, especially once they are old enough to be trusted with financial information generally. Transparency during life is the best inoculation against suspicion after death.

Treat daughters and sons, and family members near and far, according to their actual legal entitlement and according to explicitly discussed family agreements, not according to old habits of favouring whoever is physically present or male. A family that quietly assumes only sons will inherit shares, without ever revisiting that assumption in light of current law and current fairness, is inviting a dispute that a court, if it ever reaches one, is unlikely to resolve in favour of that old assumption.

When disagreement does arise among heirs, seek to resolve it through calm family discussion first, involving a respected elder or a neutral family friend as a mediator if needed, before it hardens into a legal dispute. Court processes over inherited property in Nepal can take years and can cost far more, in both money and family relationships, than almost any dispute is worth. Many disputes that end up in court began as a misunderstanding that thirty minutes of honest conversation, at the right time, could have resolved.

Dilip has taken this lesson seriously in his own planning. He has told Prakash and Ashmita, together, in the same conversation, exactly how he intends his remaining shares to be divided between his son and his daughter in Kathmandu, has confirmed this intention matches what a lawyer has advised him is consistent with proper succession practice, and has made sure both his son and his daughter have heard this directly from him rather than secondhand. He does not expect this guarantees perfect harmony after he is gone. But he has given his family the clearest possible starting point, built on information rather than guesswork, which is the most any one person can really do.