Freefincal contributor · NISM certified · I teach the framework, not products.
Most professionals won't choose when they retire. Their circumstances will choose for them.
I'm Sneha. I spent twenty years in Corporate Finance & IT. Now I write about retirement and why the numbers are rarely the problem.
The Story That Stayed With Me
I didn't set out to work in personal finance. It started at a colleague's retirement party.
She had worked thirty-five years. Saved. Invested. Lived modestly. And she still couldn't bring herself to stop working. Not because she wanted to keep going. Because she didn't trust the number.
That stayed with me. What does it actually take to trust your own retirement?
So I went looking. Books, workshops, and NISM certifications in investment advisory and retirement planning. Twenty years in corporate finance and IT had taught me how to take something complicated and make it usable. I decided to point that at this question instead.
The maths of retirement turned out to be the easy part.
Three numbers worth knowing
Earlier this year, I wrote about three numbers every working professional should know. Not a corpus target borrowed from YouTube or a rule of thumb, but numbers built around your own life.
Most people carry one retirement number in their head, and it's usually either far too high or far too low. I found it more useful to work out three.
Survival is what you need to keep the lights on if everything else goes wrong.
Comfort is what you need to live the way you live now, without cutting back.
Freedom is what you need before the question stops occupying your mind.
They're usually much further apart than people expect, and knowing which one you've actually reached changes how you think about your options.
The calculator is a spreadsheet. It's free. Put your own figures in and it will tell you where you stand.
You'll also get my newsletter, and you can leave whenever you want.
About Me
My name is Sneha Rege. I'm based in Bangalore.
Most personal finance writing in India is either a product pitch or a spreadsheet. What gets left out is the part that decides whether a plan survives: how people behave when the market drops, when the job turns toxic, when the corpus looks right on paper and wrong in the body.
That's what I write about.
My background is twenty years in corporate finance and IT across large multinational manufacturers. My real interest is the behavioural side of money, the gap between what investors know they should do and what they actually do when it matters. That gap is where most plans fail, and very few people write about it honestly, because there's nothing to sell there.
I write regularly as a guest contributor at Freefincal, on retirement, risk profiling, REITs, inheritance and the psychology of managing your own money. My newsletter, The Silent Corpus, goes out every two weeks to readers who'd rather think about this properly than be sold to.
I also run one-to-one sessions and small-group workshops on Topmate. These are educational. I teach the arithmetic and the frameworks so you can apply them to your own situation, and I don't recommend products. You can reach out to me at https://topmate.io/sneha_rege/
Certifications & Education
NISM Series X-A, Investment Adviser Level 1 — cleared 2025
NISM Series XVII, Retirement Adviser — cleared July 2026
NISM Series X-B, Investment Adviser Level 2 — Planned in 2027
Commerce Graduate, Executive CS (ICSI), Executive PGP, IIM Nagpur
To be plain about where I stand today: NISM certification is not SEBI registration. I hold the certifications. I am not yet registered. Until that changes, everything I offer is educational.