I’m from Delhi. I lived in the United States for twelve years and moved back to India in 2019. Most of what I write here I worked out because I needed the answer myself first, on one side of that move or the other.
I write everything on NutriZoe. Here’s what I’ve actually done, so you can decide how much weight to give any of it.
The short version, if you only read one thing about Aradhana Sharma
I’m a financial consultant working with small-scale businesses, from Delhi. I spent twelve years living and working in the United States and moved back to India in 2019, which means I have filed on both sides of this move and from both directions. I’ve spent 9 years self-employed across 7 global platforms, and I teach business and finance courses on Udemy. On this site I cover US retirement accounts, cross-border tax reporting, and the software a one-person business runs on.
The people I help are mostly Indians who moved here for the same reasons everyone does: a job, a degree, a transfer, a family. The financial questions that follow are ones I have had to answer for myself.
Why I write about this specifically
Because I couldn’t find it written down anywhere when I needed it.
US personal finance writing assumes you were born here, have no accounts anywhere else, and aren’t going anywhere. Indian personal finance writing assumes you live in India. Neither is written for someone holding a US retirement account and a savings account in Delhi at the same time, wondering which country wants to know about which.
That gap is wide and it is expensive. It’s where people miss an FBAR they didn’t know existed, or cash out a 401(k) on the way home and lose a large slice of it to tax and penalty. Both are common enough that they come up in almost every conversation I have about this.
Two directions feed the work, and they overlap.
The consulting side means I sit with small business owners and sole proprietors while they make decisions about retirement accounts, tax planning, and the systems underneath both. I see which structures people choose, and more usefully, I see which ones they abandon after eight months because the setup was too fiddly to maintain.
The self-employed side means I’ve been on the other end of it. Nine years of irregular income, quarterly estimated payments, platform fees, and the specific problem of saving for retirement when nobody’s matching anything. For readers holding a US visa and an Indian bank account at the same time, that irregularity sits on top of a reporting problem most US finance writing never mentions. When I write about automating contributions on an income that swings, that’s a problem I solved for myself before I wrote about it.
Teaching on Udemy forces a third discipline. You can’t hand-wave in a course, because students email you when step 4 doesn’t match what they see on screen. That habit carries over here.
What I’m qualified to say, and what I’m not
I’ll be direct about this, because money content on the internet is full of people who won’t be.
I’m not a licensed financial advisor. I’m not a CPA, an enrolled agent, or a tax attorney. I’m also not an immigration lawyer, which matters on a site that touches visa status, so anything about work authorisation here points you to one rather than answering it. I don’t hold a securities licence, I don’t manage anyone’s money, and I can’t tell you what to do with yours.
What I can do is explain how the mechanisms work, show you where the official numbers live, and lay out the trade-offs between options clearly enough that you walk into a professional’s office knowing what to ask. That’s the job this site does. For anything with real money riding on it, go see someone licensed who can look at your actual return.
How I handle numbers
Every contribution limit, threshold, and deadline on this site gets pulled from the agency that sets it, on the day the post is written or updated. Retirement figures come from the IRS retirement plans section. Wage base and benefit figures come from the Social Security Administration. Plan rules that trace back to statute get checked against the Department of Labor’s benefits administration.
Residency questions get checked against IRS Publication 519, which is the reference for aliens filing US returns. These numbers change every year, so posts that depend on them carry a review date, and when a limit moves I update the post rather than leaving a stale figure sitting there collecting search traffic. FBAR and foreign asset thresholds get the same treatment, sourced from FinCEN rather than from another blog’s summary.
What I write about most
The deepest work on this site is the retirement material, including what happens to a 401(k) when you leave the US, and the choice between a Solo 401(k) and the alternatives, running through Roth IRA mechanics for self-employed income, and into the stranger corners like defined benefit plans for high-earning solo operators, which almost nobody writes about properly.
I also cover the tools side, though I hold it to the same standard. A tool post here means I used the thing on real work, and the review methodology spells out exactly what that involves.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I want to know. A wrong contribution limit or an outdated deadline is worse than no post at all, because someone might act on it. Send it to me through the contact page and I’ll correct the post and note what changed. The full policy on that’s in the editorial policy.
Why Aradhana Sharma writes this and not somebody else. An NRI financial consultant who has only ever advised from one side of a move can tell you what the rules say. Aradhana Sharma has filed on both sides of it, twelve years of US returns and then a departure year, which is a different kind of knowing.
As NutriZoe author she writes every page on the site. No ghostwriters and no contributor network, which means the NRI financial consultant reading the source documents is the same person writing the sentence you are reading. Where Aradhana Sharma is not qualified, and on visa and legal questions she is not, the page says so and points you at somebody who is.