I built a quick calculator for a very specific, very Indian problem: Golden Visa math vs RBI's LRS limit

Greko India — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:54:24 +0000

A relative asked me last month whether he could "just wire €400,000 to Greece" for a property investment. I said probably not in one shot, and then spent ten minutes trying to explain LRS limits, and realized I was doing the same mental math on a napkin that I'd probably do again for the next person who asked.

So I built a small calculator instead. Nothing fancy — vanilla JS, no framework, one HTML file. But it solves a real annoyance, so I figured it's worth sharing.

The problem

If you're an Indian resident and you want to invest abroad — property, funds, whatever — you're capped by RBI's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS): USD 250,000 per person, per financial year, for capital account transactions. Couples can combine limits, which effectively doubles it to USD 500,000/year if both partners remit.

This matters a lot for EU Golden Visa programs, because several of the common investment thresholds sit right at the edge of that limit. Greece's mid-tier is €400,000. Portugal's fund route is €500,000. Depending on the day's exchange rate, either one might fit inside a single financial year's LRS allowance, or it might require structuring the remittance across two years — which changes your whole application timeline.

I got tired of doing this conversion by hand every time someone asked, so I built a small tool that does three things:

Converts a given EUR investment threshold to INR at a live-editable exchange rate
Converts that to USD to check it against the LRS ceiling
Shows, visually, what percentage of the annual LRS limit it consumes — and flags whether it fits in one year or needs multi-year structuring

The interesting bit, technically

There's nothing algorithmically complex here — it's arithmetic with a UI. The one design decision worth mentioning: I made both exchange rates (EUR→INR and USD→INR) independently editable rather than hardcoding a fixed EUR→USD cross rate. Currency data goes stale fast, and I'd rather someone plug in today's actual bank rate than trust a number I baked in three months ago. It also means the tool stays useful even if EUR/USD moves independently of INR — which, this year, it has, more than once.

The LRS check itself is just:

javascriptconst lrsLimit = mode === 'single' ? 250000 : 500000;
const pct = (usdEquivalent / lrsLimit) * 100;

But wrapping that one line in a visual gauge with a clear "fits in one year" vs "needs multi-year structuring" verdict turned out to be more useful than I expected — it's the difference between someone understanding their situation in three seconds versus doing the math themselves and probably getting it slightly wrong under pressure.

Try it

[Live version here — no build step, just open the HTML file] — punch in a Greece or Portugal threshold, adjust the exchange rate to today's actual number, toggle single vs couple, and see where you land.

If you want the fuller context on why Greek and Portuguese thresholds look the way they do right now — Portugal dropped its real estate route back in 2023, and both programs have shifted their numbers more than once since — Greko India has a fairly detailed writeup on the current state of both programs that I found genuinely useful while sanity-checking my numbers for this.

Open to feedback on the calc logic if anyone spots an edge case I'm missing — I built this in an afternoon, not a sprint.

DEV Community: Greko India

I built a quick calculator for a very specific, very Indian problem: Golden Visa math vs RBI's LRS limit