About
The way to building Invest for Balance.
I'm Shonan Kothari. I live in Belgium with my partner and daughter, and I am an NRI. I work in impact investing, and I'm building Invest for Balance. This page is the longer version of why.
The path that led here.
I started my career as a research assistant at the Harvard Business School India Research Centre, and stayed on as a research associate. In Brussels, I worked in financial regulation, on the public-interest side. Today I work in impact investing, where I write our fund impact reports - and writing fund reports is an education in reading them. I hold the QPFP, the Qualified Personal Finance Professional certification, in India.
The gap I couldn't unsee.
For years, I knew how finance worked at a professional level - and did very little about investing for myself.
I had reasons. A demanding career. A new country. A new family. The sense that I would get to it later. Underneath them was something else: I had never seen the women around me invest. My mother didn't. My aunts didn't. My friends mostly didn't. The financial decisions in the families I grew up around were mostly made by the men, and the women - even the ones with degrees, with careers, with strong opinions about everything else - left that particular conversation alone.
A question I'd been asking at sixteen.
As a teenager, there was a time I spoke in a debate. My subject was the Khasi - one of India's matrilineal societies. I didn't know why it interested me then. Looking back, these questions have been with me longer than I realised.
So I learned it properly.
I stumbled upon an investing group in Europe. I started reading. Researching. Attending lectures. Pursuing the QPFP. Building a notion document that, my husband joked, looked like I was writing the Mahabharat - he wasn't wrong. I wanted to understand it well enough to act, and well enough to teach.
Today, most of the funds I work with (in Europe) are run by women.
Simplicity is wealth to me. So I waited until I could prove a method from my own experience.
Across generations.
My nani.
My nani is 92. She used to walk in the Indian freedom marches. She wrote books in Gujarati. She and my nana volunteered at a hospital every Sunday for decades. She raised a family, stitched her own clothes, and played games with her grandchildren.
I found out last year that she only studied until the ninth grade. Her teacher begged her parents not to pull her out. They did anyway - she was needed at home. So, in her free time, she taught the other children, which is how she kept learning.
I never would have guessed. She is the most successful person I know.
My mother.
My nani decided her daughter would have an education. My mother went all the way to a master's, and was twice offered work at the television studio where she trained. It was not a time when she could pursue this. She has spent the decades since giving her time to causes she cares about: education and women's businesses.
Me, and my daughter.
My mother decided I would work. I've had a twenty-year career. My father calls me almost every day to hear about it.
I have a daughter now. I want her to grow up assuming this is hers to understand. She is why I stopped waiting.
Why I'm building this.
Three generations. Each one of us pushed the line a little further forward than the woman before. None of them ever made me feel that anything had been taken from them. They just built the fullest lives they could with the room they had.
I am building Invest for Balance because I can. Because the women before me made the room. And because my daughter is watching.
Three years, one experiment.
Once I had a framework I trusted - research-backed and long-term - I tested it on my own portfolio. In parallel, I tracked what one of India's leading wealth management firms recommended for the same money. After three years, my portfolio fared well.
My family now involves me to guide them on their investments too.
The idea kept following me. Whatever I read seemed to feed it. Whatever I learned seemed to belong to it. Four years ago, asked to write two pages about personal purpose, I found Invest for Balance already on the page - named, and pointed at women. This course and community is what I am building from it.
The education that should have come before any advice.
Invest for Balance is a structured financial education course for Indian women - in India and abroad. It is not personal financial advice. It is the long, calm explanation nobody gives you before they start selling.
It covers how to think about your goals, how risk actually works, how to choose what to own, and how to build a portfolio that fits your life. There are downloadable resources for those of you investing from outside India.
It is designed for women, and it is open to everyone. A woman who learns to invest rarely keeps it to herself - if someone in your life should be learning this too, bring them along.
Ready to see the course?
The full seven-part curriculum, the timeline, the pricing, and what's included.