How to track your India investments when you live abroad

Meera is 34, a product manager at a fintech company in London. She has been in the UK for six years. Before she left, she was diligent: Zerodha account set up, a couple of Kuvera SIPs running, a joint FD with her mother in Chennai, a flat her parents bought with her as a co-owner, some sovereign gold bonds from a 2021 issue.

She checks her India portfolio approximately once a year — usually when her parents call about something. The rest of the time, it's an abstraction: "somewhere around 60–70 lakhs, I think." She doesn't know the current number. She doesn't know what it is in pounds. She definitely doesn't know what percentage of her total net worth her India assets represent.

Meera is not unusual. For the roughly 32 million NRIs and overseas Indians with assets back home, India investments occupy this peculiar mental space: important enough to worry about occasionally, opaque enough to never fully understand. The time zone, the platform fragmentation, the currency conversion — each one is a small enough barrier that the full picture never quite gets assembled.

The real problem: your India money lives in five different places

Here's what Meera's financial life actually looks like, spread across platforms, asset types, and currencies:

Each of these is tracked in a different app, at a different login, in Indian rupees. Meera's salary, mortgage, and everyday expenses are all in GBP. The mental overhead of converting and consolidating is high enough that it just doesn't happen.

Why the currency gap matters more than you think

For NRIs, currency risk is not just a background factor — it is central to how your India wealth actually performs. Between 2015 and 2026, the Indian rupee depreciated roughly 35% against the British pound. An India portfolio that grew at 10% CAGR in rupee terms effectively grew at closer to 4–5% CAGR in GBP terms, after accounting for that depreciation.

This is not an argument against India investments. It's an argument for knowing your real net worth — denominated in the currency you actually live in. The number on the Zerodha app is not your number if your life is in London or Dubai.

The privacy concern NRIs have — and how it's addressed

Many NRIs are hesitant to use any portfolio tracker for a simple reason: they don't want their investment quantities, cost basis, or personal financial details stored on a server somewhere — especially not one they can't audit.

This is a legitimate concern. Most portfolio trackers do store your data server-side, often combined with your identity and investment behavior for advertising or cross-sell purposes.

How to actually set it up — in under 15 minutes

You do not need your exact figures to start. Rough approximations get you 90% of the insight with 10% of the effort. You can always refine later.

1. 1
   Select your asset classes. On the start screen, tick which types of assets you have: India stocks, mutual funds, fixed deposits, gold (physical, SGB, or digital), and real estate. If you have loans (home loan, personal loan), tick that too — it will be deducted from your gross assets to give you a true net worth.
2. 2
   Enter your holdings. For stocks and mutual funds, enter the ticker or fund name — Worthly auto-suggests from NSE tickers and 12,000+ AMFI schemes. For FDs, enter the principal, rate, and tenure. For property and gold, enter your current estimated value. Rough estimates are fine for a first pass.
3. 3
   Set your home currency. In the dashboard, switch the currency display to GBP, USD, AED, or CAD. Your entire net worth — every asset — converts in real time using live FX rates.
4. 4
   Download your file. Worthly creates a single JSON file — your complete portfolio, history, and everything else. Save it to your laptop or let Google Drive sync it automatically. Next time you log in, it's there waiting. No re-entering.

The one habit that changes everything for NRIs

The biggest difference between NRIs who stay genuinely in touch with their India wealth and those who don't is a simple habit: a 15-minute quarterly check-in. Not a review, not a rebalance — just a look. Load the portfolio, refresh the prices, see where things stand.

When Meera set up Worthly, she found something she hadn't expected: her India net worth, converted to GBP, was a meaningful percentage of her total assets — more than she'd realised. The flat alone, at current Chennai prices, represented almost 40% of her net worth. She had no idea. And that fact — that a single illiquid, non-income-producing asset dominated her balance sheet — was something she could now start making decisions about.

That's the point of tracking. Not obsession. Just awareness. Enough clarity to make better choices, once a quarter, with clear eyes.