Built for One. Shared with Many.

The Origin

I've been obsessed with personal finance since I got my first payslip and realised I understood almost none of it. Not the PF deduction, not the HRA exemption, definitely not what to do with what was left over. Most of what I found online was either too generic ("invest in index funds!") or too salesperson-shaped to trust.

So I started building my own tools. Spreadsheets at first — a SIP model here, a tax estimator there. They worked but they didn't talk to each other, and sharing a Google Sheet with a friend always ended in confusion. At some point the gap between what I wanted and what existed felt small enough to close. This site is that attempt.

The Name

Returns are never symmetric. That's not a complaint — it's the single most important thing to understand about financial risk.

Most products that get marketed as sophisticated are left-skewed: they generate small, steady gains most of the time and catastrophic losses in the extremes. The asymmetry works quietly against you — until, suddenly, it doesn't. You lose rarely but badly, and the rarity fools you into thinking the exposure is small.

The idea behind Asymmetrica is the opposite: identify where your exposures are left-skewed, and wherever possible flip the structure. You want your worst case to be small and known, and your best case to be large and open-ended — not the other way around. Payoffs shaped that way are rare, almost never what gets sold, and worth paying a premium for. The name is a standing reminder to keep checking which way the skew runs.

What This Is

Asymmetrica is a small, opinionated collection of calculators and reading notes focused on Indian personal finance. Every calculator here grew out of a real question I was trying to answer — often in the middle of a tax return, or while trying to explain to a family member why their insurance-linked savings plan was a bad deal.

The calculators show their work. The math is in the open. If a number surprises you, you can see exactly why — which I find more useful than a black box that hands you a "corpus target" with no trail.

The reading list is even more selective. A link goes in when I've read it carefully and think it teaches something durable — not because it's new or trending. If an article hasn't aged well, it gets removed.

Who I Am

By training, an engineer. By profession, I work in financial risk — which means my day job involves thinking about tail events, model uncertainty, and what happens when things go badly wrong. The personal finance obsession comes with the territory. I live in India, invest primarily in low-cost index mutual funds and direct equities, and spend more time than is healthy thinking about tax efficiency, asset allocation, and the structural incentives behind most financial products.

I don't manage anyone else's money, I'm not a registered investment adviser, and nothing on this site is financial advice. These are the tools I built to think clearly about my own finances. Use them the same way — as a thinking aid, not a decision engine.

Why Share It

Mostly because I got tired of explaining the same things over and over in conversations — how SIP math actually works, what the difference between old-regime and new-regime tax really means for your salary, why a mutual fund's XIRR and its advertised return are different numbers.

If this site saves someone three hours of spreadsheet work or one bad financial product decision, it's done its job. I don't run ads, I don't sell anything, and I don't have a newsletter to push you towards. The site is free, public, and will stay that way.