About

I'm Amit Kumar. For more than twenty years I've worked in banking technology, and for the last several of them I've done it as an Indian living in the UAE. That combination is really what this site is about. On one side are the money questions every household runs into and most expats run into twice — where savings should sit, how they're taxed, what to do with income and investments split across two countries. On the other is the work itself: leading technology teams inside a large bank, and building things that have to hold up in a regulated, high-stakes setting. I write about both, in plain language, from the inside.

What I do

My day job is leading an IT value stream at a large bank, across platform, frontend, QA, data, infrastructure, and delivery. Most of it isn't writing code. It's building teams that can be handed hard problems and trusted with them, driving change through an organisation that has real reasons to resist it, and finding the efficiency that lets us deliver more without adding risk or headcount.

Outside the day job, I build. Mostly small personal-finance applications, statement parsers that turn messy bank and mutual-fund data into something you can actually use, a few AI tools and agents, and the occasional product on Gumroad. Some of it works, some of it I've thrown away, and the second category has taught me more.

Why this blog exists

For years, friends and colleagues have asked me the same personal-finance questions — how to think about savings, what to do with a bonus, whether something is worth investing in, how much to keep aside and where. I like those conversations, and I kept noticing I was giving the same careful answer again and again.

The questions got sharper once people started living abroad, me included. Cross-border life adds a layer most personal-finance writing skips over: NRE and FCNR deposits, money sitting in two countries at once, tax that depends on where you live, currencies that rarely move in your favour. Straight answers are hard to find, and the stakes are real.

So I started writing each of these down once, properly, with the actual numbers, and keeping it somewhere I could point people to. That's this site.

How it works

One story a week. Never a roundup, never ten half-thoughts dressed up as a list — the single most useful thing I can say that week, with real figures in it. On the money side I lay out the trade-off and leave the decision to you; where a number is time-sensitive, I'll say so, because rates and prices change. On the building side, the substance is whatever I actually did, including the parts that went wrong.

Most posts begin as a thread on X and get the full treatment here. If you want the short version, follow @singhamit_cxo; the long version always lives on this site.

A note before you read

Everything here is my personal opinion, written in my own time. It is not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold anything. It has no connection to my employer: I don't write about them, speak for them, or use anything confidential, and nothing here should be read as their view.

Your money decisions are your own. Where I mention rates, prices, or rules, check them yourself on the day you act, because they move. If a decision matters, talk to a qualified adviser who knows your full situation.