Nothing was pushing Sunita out of the United States. She had a 23-year career in financial advice, her own practice, and an income most people would trade places for. In her mid-50s she sold the house, wound down the practice and moved to Pondicherry, and she is candid about the one thing she wishes she had done first.
Nothing was pushing Sunita out. No layoff, no family emergency, no money worry. She had spent twenty-three years in US financial services and run her own practice for the last decade of it. In her mid-50s she sold the house, wound the practice down, and moved to Pondicherry to start again.
Sunita did not go to America chasing dollars. She says it plainly: there were no dollar dreams. Her husband's family was in the US, she and her husband were both well placed in Mumbai, and the move was a family decision rather than an ambition. She made the first entry in 2002 for the paperwork, came back, and left for good in 2003.
She was in her mid-30s, with a master's in business management and fifteen years of work behind her. She had been a group product manager running food brands. None of it transferred. She was not in tech, so there was no wave to ride and no role she could plug into. Her two options were to get her credentials accredited in the US, or do another MBA, and either way she was paying money and years to stand where she had already stood.
Small things caught her too. She had never driven in India. In New Jersey, not driving is not a quirk, it is a wall.
She is careful not to dress this up. It was hard psychologically, especially for someone who had always worked. Her husband, who was in the automotive industry, found his footing quickly. She did not. Then, about three months in, she interviewed with the wealth management arm of American Express, and they hired her on the bet she made about herself: that she could cross-skill, that she would take the exams, that she would learn.
She did. She earned her CFP and the rest of the required designations, and stayed in the industry for twenty-three years, the last ten of them running her own practice.
In 2016 she and her husband divorced. That left her without immediate family in the US, but she is emphatic that this is not the reason she left. Her sister and brother were in Europe, her mother and two younger sisters in India, and none of that was the trigger either.
What was happening, in her late 40s, was a question that would not go away: what next. She knew she wanted a second innings, and she knew she wanted it in the nonprofit world. Working in US financial services, she had a close view of what she calls the psychosis built around retirement in America. Do you have enough. What about healthcare. Even people with the means stay on the wheel because letting go feels unsafe.
The traditional route was obvious. Work until 65, then start giving back. Then Covid happened and the arithmetic changed. She spoke to people in hospital one day and heard they had died the next. People in their 50s. Everyone says life is fragile; experiencing it that way is different.
So she moved the date. If the second innings was going to be real, it had to start in her 50s, not after them. Ten good years from 55 to 65, while she was healthy and active, was the asset she was actually managing.
The thought first surfaced in 2018. The decision was not made until early 2024. Six years is a long gap, and Covid explains part of it, but the honest reason is that nothing was forcing her hand.
There was no family emergency. Nobody was pushing her out of a job. She loved the work and was good at it. She describes the difficulty in a way that anyone comfortable and quietly restless will recognise: people would give an arm and a leg to be in my place, just to be in a place to earn like that. Giving it up voluntarily was harder than being pushed.
And she made the call by herself. As a single woman she was not running it past a spouse, and friends and family were invested in her without being inside the decision. Her phrase for it is exact: a very individual, in a dark cave decision.
By May or June of 2024 the ball was rolling. Winding down a practice built over a decade is not a resignation letter. Clients had to be handed over properly, the house had to be sold, and a life had to be dismantled in the right order.
She thought about renting it out. Two things pushed her the other way.
The first was practical. She did not want to manage a property, a tenant and a repair list from eight thousand miles away while trying to build something new.
The second is the more interesting one, and it is the part most people skip. A house you can return to is a plan B. And a plan B, she says, means that at the slightest discomfort you run back. She wanted to give the move her best, which meant letting it play out fully, "with all its glory and dirt." A clean slate made that possible.
This will not be the right answer for everyone. Some families keep the US home deliberately, for income, for a child at college, or because their return is genuinely a trial. The useful part of her reasoning is the question underneath it: what job is that house actually doing in your plan? If the honest answer is "it lets me quit," decide whether you want that door open.
If you are working through the same list, the financial checklist for NRIs moving back to India covers the sequence of accounts, assets and paperwork that usually needs to move with you.
Sunita did her own planning, which is a real advantage when planning is your profession. The choice she made inside that plan is worth copying even if your numbers look nothing like hers.
She modelled her expenses as though she were still living in the United States.
Not as though she were moving to a cheaper country. Her move was not motivated by lowering her cost of living, and she wanted the model to hold if she ever had to go back. If the plan works at US costs, India cannot deliver a nasty surprise, and returning to America is not financially catastrophic. She layered the usual discipline on top: a conservative growth rate, so the portfolio outperforming is upside rather than the assumption, and inflation built in rather than hoped away.
That combination is what let her walk away from a high income at 55 without treating it as a leap of faith. The freedom came from the modelling, not from optimism.
Here is the regret, in her own framing: she read up on cross-border taxation and the double taxation treaty, but she did not sit down with an India-side CPA who does cross-border work before the move. She got her questions answered after she landed, and some of the answers were things she had not known.
Coming from someone who spent twenty-three years in the industry, that is the most useful thing in the whole conversation. Her advice is not "read more." It is: do not take what you read or what people tell you as gospel, because the answers are nuanced and they depend on your specific situation.
These are the traps she names.
The advice she hears repeated is simple and dangerous: you get roughly two tax-advantaged years as a Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident, so liquidate the 401(k) and the IRA inside it because India will not tax it. Her response is blunt. What if those accounts are worth a few million? Are you going to hand more than half of it to the US in tax because somebody crowded your head with a two-year window?
The window is real and it is worth planning around. It is not a reason to compress a twenty-year drawdown into twenty-four months. Model the US bracket you would land in, then compare that with the Indian tax you are avoiding. Our 401(k) guide for people moving back to India works through the same decision with numbers, and the free RNOR calculator will tell you how many tax years you actually get.
She understands the pull. In the US you go through heart attacks trying to get a steady 7%. In India it sits there on a fixed deposit. But if there is any chance you go back, or a child goes to the US to study, the currency conversion on the way out can wipe out the yield you were chasing. Bring assets across because your life needs them here, not because the headline rate looks better.
She has asked several tax professionals and got several versions. The common thread runs like this. If you already hold a Roth and withdraw after 59½, the US treats it as tax-free, but Indian practice tends to treat it as income from a retirement asset and therefore taxable once you are ordinarily resident. Her own question is one worth putting to your adviser in writing: if the US return does not show it as taxable on a 1099-R, on what basis is India taxing it?
The second scenario is worse. If you have already moved to India and you convert a traditional IRA to a Roth, you pay US tax at conversion, potentially Indian tax on the same conversion, and then possibly Indian tax again when you withdraw later. The one case where the maths flips is legacy planning: if the money is for inheritance and you will never draw it, the long timeline can justify paying now.
The US calls a holding long-term after one year. India uses two years for assets outside Indian listed securities, which is where most foreign shares sit. Sell at eighteen months and the same trade is long-term in your US return and short-term in your Indian one, taxed at your slab rate. It is a quiet, expensive mismatch, and it is entirely avoidable by checking the Indian clock before you place the sell order.
US federal tax chases citizens and green card holders until they die, wherever they live. State tax is severable. She came from New Jersey, one of the heavier states, and the exit involves giving up the driver's licence, the voter registration and the other markers of residency. Her caution is about timing: do not do it in year one to save tax if you are not certain. Re-establishing state residency later means going back, staying, and rebuilding proof that is no longer easy to assemble.
Her biggest learning, said to herself by name: don't try to optimize. Just don't try. It's not possible, even if it's your instinct. Taxation is one input into a long-term plan. You will lose some of those battles, and some of them you should lose. If you are filing on both sides for the first time, the guide to filing Indian taxes without attracting notices is the practical companion to this.
Asked for the corpus multiple, Sunita will not give one, and her reason is better than the answer would have been. She takes three or four trips a year. That is real money and it is not in most people's model. She does not own a home in India and pays rent. Somebody else already owns theirs. Two people with identical portfolios can have completely different answers.
Her instruction is to go by line items, and she flags the two that dominate in India:
If the city is still open, our comparison of the best cities in India for NRI retirement is a reasonable place to see how far that housing line moves.
Sunita moved as a single woman and did not weigh safety heavily in the decision. She had been visiting India constantly, and she says the social fabric is not what it was twenty or thirty years ago.
What she did underestimate was community. In the US she had a band of women friends, single, close, with routines that were not dictated by husbands and children. That kind of friendship clusters by default. In India she did not have that luxury. Her family is in Bangalore and her work is in Pondicherry, so, as she puts it, for all practical purposes she is still alone. Finding her tribe is a work in progress.
She is not complaining, and most returnees do land near family. But if you are moving back alone, or moving to a city where you have no existing network, this is the item that never makes it onto the spreadsheet and should.
The first year, she says, is the romance year. Everything is a novelty even in a country you know, because you are house-hunting, settling in, and busy.
After that, two things surfaced. She misses the outdoors. She was an outdoorsy person, and where she lives now is coastal, so she misses the greenery and the kind of weather that lets you simply go for a walk. The second is subtler and takes longer to notice: in the US, when something is promised, it usually happens. You call a number, they log it, and it comes back to you. You are not chasing it ten times. What they say is what they will do.
Her advice to anyone with a low tolerance for that gap is specific and good. Do not come as a visitor. Come and stay six months, ideally a year, so you live through the changing seasons and deal with the plumber and the phone number and the follow-up. You find out early whether the friction is a shrug or a dealbreaker.
She is equally clear about what she finds hardest, and it is not the plumber. It is inequality: of wealth, of opportunity. She copes by doing something small and concrete about it rather than nothing about all of it. Second on that list is what she calls an acceptance of mediocrity. Indian families set an extremely high bar for education and ambition, and a much lower one for the quality of work and the state of the environment around us. Her point is that acceptance is contagious. First we learn to accept it, then we learn to contribute to it.
The credit column is longer than she expected. Healthcare is transformed, though she notes honestly that this is a positive change only if you have the means. Digitalisation is everywhere and makes everyday life genuinely easier. Civic sense has gone the other way, mostly because we consume far more now and generate far more waste than we did. And the constant, at least where she lives, is warmth. Human interaction that is not purely transactional.
The work itself has landed. She is building a financial literacy module for women running micro-enterprises, which is the exact intersection of twenty-three years of technical skill and the reason she came back. Because she volunteers rather than draws a salary, she takes the summer off and travels. On the work, she says she could not have asked for more.
What makes Sunita's story unusual is that there was no crisis in it. No visa wall, no illness, no redundancy. She had every reason to stay and she left anyway, because she had worked out that time, not money, was the scarce asset. That is a harder decision than the ones forced on you, and it is the one most people reading this will actually face.
Sunita's second innings is only a year or so old, and she is the first to say she rode a wave of optimism into it without seeing everything. But the structure underneath the decision is solid, and it is copyable: a hard number that assumes the expensive country, a professional consulted at the right time, and a clear-eyed view of what she was trading away. The move was not the leap. The planning was.
Personal experience shared in interview format. Not financial, legal, immigration or tax advice. Cross-border tax positions depend on your residency, citizenship and account types, and rules change. Confirm your own position with a qualified professional in both countries.
Start with the tax years you actually get, then build the rest of the plan around them.
Bring your likely move date, the year you last left India, and a rough split of your retirement, brokerage and property assets.
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