Moving countries is a paperwork problem disguised as a life decision. The visa is the part everyone helps you with. The money is the part nobody does.
NutriZoe covers that gap for Indians living and working in the United States. Students on F-1, professionals on H1B, families on a green card, and anyone running their own thing on an EAD. The common thread is that you file in one country, hold accounts in another, and get advice written for neither.
I’m Aradhana Sharma. I’m from Delhi. I lived and worked in the United States for twelve years and moved back to India in 2019, and I work as a financial consultant for small businesses. I’ve spent 9 years inside self-employment across 7 global platforms and I teach business and finance courses on Udemy. I write every word here.
Most of what is on this site started as a question I had to answer for myself after moving.
What this site covers, and who NutriZoe is about
Four things, all of them aimed at the same reader. When a topic falls outside them, I don’t write it, and that rule has killed more drafts than it has published.
US retirement accounts, including what happens if you leave
The question underneath most 401(k) threads on Indian immigrant forums is what happens to the money if you go back. That fear makes people skip the employer match, which is the most expensive mistake in this area, so the guide for H1B holders answers it head on. For anyone self-employed on a green card or an EAD, the first real decision is whether to open a SEP IRA or a Solo 401(k). People pick wrong and find out two years later.
Filing in two countries at once
The accounts you still hold in India create obligations most people discover late. FinCEN wants an FBAR once your foreign accounts cross $10,000 in aggregate at any point in the year, and that threshold gets crossed by a salary account and an old fixed deposit adding up, not by one big balance. This section covers residency tests, how the IRS treats nonresident aliens differently from residents, what gets reported where, self-employment tax, and what you can legitimately deduct if you work for yourself.
Software that earns its subscription
Most tool roundups are commission-funded lists wearing a review costume. I try to write the other kind, and the tools section collects them. When I looked at accounting software for self-employed people, the winner wasn’t the one with the biggest marketing budget, and when I went through security tools a solo operator actually needs, most of the list turned out to be free.
AI tools, after somebody has actually used them
There’s a lot of noise here. I test things on real client work before I write about them, which is why the Claude Code guide includes the parts that broke and not just the parts that demo well.
Why this site exists at all
There’s a lot of good US personal finance writing. It assumes you were born here, have no foreign accounts, and are never leaving. There’s a lot of good Indian personal finance writing too, and it assumes you live in India. Neither one is written for someone holding a US visa, a 401(k), and a savings account back home at the same time.
That overlap is where the expensive mistakes live, and it’s where this site spends most of its time. The tools coverage is still here, because plenty of readers run their own business, and it gets less space than the money.
What I am, and what I’m not
I’m a financial consultant who works with small businesses, I’ve spent 9 years self-employed rather than observing it from a newsroom, and I have been through the move from India myself. I teach this material to paying students on Udemy. When I explain how a Solo 401(k) contribution splits between employee deferral and employer profit-sharing, I’m explaining something I’ve had to do with my own numbers.
Here’s the honest limit. I’m not a licensed financial advisor, I’m not a CPA, and I’m not a tax attorney. Nothing on this site is personalised advice, because personalised advice requires knowing your full situation and carrying a licence I don’t hold. Everything here is general education, sourced to primary documents where numbers are involved. For a decision with real money attached, take it to a licensed professional who can look at your actual return.
You’ll find the full version of that in the site disclaimer, and I’d rather you read it than skip it.
How anything gets published here
Every figure gets pulled from a primary source on the day of writing. IRS contribution limits come from the IRS retirement plan limit pages, Social Security thresholds come from the SSA wage base table, and software pricing comes from the vendor’s own pricing page rather than someone else’s summary of it. If I can’t source a number, the sentence gets rewritten until the number is gone.
Treaty positions come from the Treasury tax treaty documents rather than a summary. Tax and retirement figures change annually, so posts covering them carry a review date at the top. When a limit moves, the post gets updated and the date changes with it. The longer version of all of this lives in the editorial policy, and the specific process for tool reviews is written out in the review methodology.
About the name
NutriZoe sounds like a nutrition brand. It isn’t one, and I know that’s confusing. The domain came first, the direction came later, and by the time the site found its subject there were already people reading it. So the name stays and the subject is what you see: money, tax and retirement for Indians in the United States.
How the site pays for itself
Display advertising, and nothing else. No link on this site earns a commission, which in a subject full of commission-funded comparisons is worth saying out loud. The full position is in the advertising disclosure.
Reaching me
Corrections are the mail I most want to get. If a number here is wrong or a limit has moved, tell me and I’ll fix it and note the change. Everything else, from questions to pitches, goes through the same place: the contact page.
Aradhana Sharma
Founder and editor, NutriZoe
Who writes NutriZoe. One person, and the about page names her rather than hiding behind a masthead. Aradhana Sharma spent twelve years living and working in the United States and moved back to India in 2019, which is why the NRI money guides here cover the leaving as carefully as the arriving. Most sites in this subject only do the arriving.
If you want to know more about NutriZoe than this page covers, the editorial policy sets out how the NRI money guides get sourced and corrected, and the author page says who writes NutriZoe and what she is not qualified to tell you.