My aunt did not bother much with technology. She did not understand the next generation’s obsession with the computer and the laptop. She had a simple mobile phone that she used for making voice calls. Until she suffered an unfortunate hip fracture.When she was bedridden and had to depend on strangers for help, she was overcome by a complex combination of pity, anger and helplessness. Her children lived abroad. She was widowed and lived by herself in a flat. She had many friends and neighbours who volunteered to help. But not being technologically savvy hurt her. She decided to learn. What does a 75-year old’s perspective on technology offer us?First, she found internet banking extremely fascinating. She knew how to use an ATM card and thought she did not need to know anything more. Now that she has activated internet banking, she delights in checking her balances, setting up and removing message alerts, setting up bill pay for all the bills her children were paying, transferring funds to pay her housing society and others, and also checking her TDS forms and statements. To transact without going to the bank was a big blessing.Second, she loved her new iPad. Not only was it immensely user friendly, but to have a single device to hear music, read books, store photos, and communicate with her children was a joy. She had depended on relatives to help her log in to video chats with her children and grandchildren, and it seemed a breeze now that she knew how to log in. She knows to manage her password keeper, she how to set up accounts, and how to create a secure password. She also has an email id now. She no longer depends on others to communicate with her children and others.Third, she is overwhelmed by the amount of spam and spurious mails and calls that hit her accounts. It took her a long time to not panic when spurious subject lines in emails spooked her. She was extremely vulnerable to believing mails that purported to come from tax authorities, the RBI and such as true. Then there were unsolicited phone calls. She learned how to block numbers and email ids but they was too much to manage. She had to spend a considerable amount of time cleaning her inboxes of spam.Fourth, she found it tough to deal with unsolicited advice about investments and insurance. Not just her bank employees, but strangers seem to have got access to her numbers and email. They routinely offered products and tried to get her to consent. She found it both invasive and scary.Fifth, she found the storing and organising of information most tough. It seemed like everything poured into one pool and she had to take time to name, store and stack her music, her documents and her stuff. The idea of the cloud did not appeal to her. She wanted everything that belonged to her to be on that instrument she was holding. No amount of convincing that she would use up space and spend too much time organising, helped. She could not appreciate the idea of her music and pictures, documents and statements residing in the cloud.Sixth, she found it very easy to have all her investments visible online. She also liked that her bank account was linked to them and she could see her dividends coming in, the value of her investments changing, and the ease with which she could invest or redeem. All these tasks were done by the CA appointed by her children. Now an intern from the same office had come over to teach her how to do all these transactions.When I spoke to her she asked me: How well are your readers prepared for immobility? That seemed like an important and profound question. Covid has created new sensibilities and new skills in many of us. But that might still be an extreme case. In our normal routine lives, have we taken care to see that our finances are organised such that they are mobility proofed? How would we do it?First, our asset composition. The more physical assets like property and gold we have, the more burdensome it is to manage them. Financial assets are immensely capable of electronic management. Imagine for a moment your child trying to sell off a flat after your time. Now imagine an electronically operated investment account. You know which one is proofed for immobility.Second, our record keeping. If our assets are well organised, listed and kept well in terms of the address being correct and updated, bank account details provided and linked for payments and receipts, nominations and other details correctly completed, it is easy for someone to take over and manage them if we are immobile or incapacitated.Third, our liabilities. Imagine a situation in which we are incapacitated and unable to do financial transactions, and our loans and liabilities are unknown to anyone but us and are accumulating overdue interest. It is a good practice to link loans to bank accounts, but such electronic linkages aren’t done for informal transactions.Fourth, our emergency funds and liquid assets. When we want someone else to manage our finances for a short period when we are incapacitated, we may want to limit access to a few assets. We may also want to smoothen the payments to hospitals, medicines and incidentals. Ensuring that a well-funded emergency corpus is available for use is important.It is important to formalise, itemise and electronically hold our assets and liabilities. It is easier to manage and easier to delegate the tasks to someone else trustworthy when we are incapacitated.My aunt reduced her holdings to a single bank account in which she got her pension. She sold off and reduced her investments to a handful. At her age a simpler financial life made sense. That may be true for many of us too. Prepare to make it easy for someone else to handle our finances, without us being stressed about facts we alone knew. We may be doing ourselves a favour.(The writer is Chairperson, Centre for Investment Education and Learning)