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Pump House With Backyard
Initially when we first decided to build a pump house, it was supposed to be just a small storage area. The plan was that this was going to be a small temporary building to be used to store all the pipes and fittings required to develop the farm. Later, once we have planted everything and when we are closer to moving to the farm permanently, we were supposed to build a proper farm house and move to that house. At least that was the plan. But as we were designing the pump house and adding more and more stuff like bathroom and a car parking place, it felt like this may not be a temporary place after all. Of course it will not be our retirement home, but we thought may be if we make a few more design changes, may be we can make it a livable space for some temporary visits to the farm.
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Year In Review - 2024 Returns
The last update in the year in review series is on my returns in 2024. In the short run, the returns might seem high or low, but in the long run it should match my expectation of 10%. That was the assumption I used when I decided to retire early. As long as I can keep my expenses inflation to around 6% and my returns to around 10%, I should be able to manage to live a decent retired life. Since it has only been about 7 years since my financial independence, there isn’t a lot of data to go with. My long term inflation is currently slightly less than 4%, so that is all good. What about my returns? Are they at least 10%?
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Pump House With Car Parking
As I mentioned in the earlier posts, we decided to build a pump house near our bore location. Initially we thought we will build something small enough to hold the starter and some pipes. Then we decided to add a bathroom. Next we decided to increase our budget and go for eco friendly bricks. At this point, we thought we should get a quotation for how much it would cost to get this much work done before changing the designs further. The contractor we chose, asked us to provide us a design with all the doors, windows, wall heights, room dimensions in sqft. etc planned out so he can give an accurate estimate. If you remember, I initially designed the pump house using SketchUp, but it lacked a lot of details. So I went about looking for another software that can do room planning.
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Year In Review - 2024 Annual Expenses
In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. This is the continuation of that post and I will be covering my annual expenses in 2024. While monthly expenses are those kind of expenses that occur more frequently, yearly expenses occur rarely, perhaps once every few years like house repairs or buying a new car etc. I will explain where we are spending the most and why. Remember that for all the expenses, whether monthly or annual, the money is coming out of my retirement corpus which consists of a bunch of debt and equity mutual funds. There are no other incomes or special savings for annual expenses.
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Pump House Roof
It is now old news that we decided to go with an eco friendly construction for our pump house. An eco friendly house may mean different things to different people. A truly eco friendly house is the one that is built with recyclable or reused building materials from another construction etc, leaving as much of a small carbon footprint as possible. While we are not into that extreme, we wanted to try to use sustainable material where possible and not increase footprint by transporting them from far off places just for the sake of recycling. Once such decision we had to take was for the roof material. Initially we were considering the regular cement roof. Then, once we decided to go with eco friendly bricks, we wondered if we should go for eco friendly roof like Mangalore tiles.
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Year In Review - 2024 Monthly Expenses
Another year and another review of our monthly expenses. Time to check where we have spent the most in 2024 and see if we are with in the budget. I will also be going over our inflation numbers starting from my financial independence till date, which is a good 7 years. At the end of the post I will prepare a new budget of monthly expenses for the year 2025. Let’s get started.
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Pump House Construction Problems
After having decided on going with an eco friendly construction for our pump house, we talked to several contractors and narrowed down to two of them. Later we finalized on of them. The contractor checked out our farm and agreed to build a pump house but had some constraints. First, he complained that there is no water and any construction is not possible without ample water. Second, he wanted electricity to cut the bricks, tiles, rods etc. He asked us to figure out how to resolve those two issues first and then he can write up a contract.
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Year In Review 2024
A very happy new year to all my readers. Another year has passed and it is time for the usual year in review to bring out some highlights and low lights from our life in the past year. Time to reflect and assess how things went. The past year was good in some ways and not so good in other ways. I think it is pretty much how most years are anyway :). Don’t think a year can be all good or all bad.
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Be Mindful Of Health
While I advocate being frugal, saving as much as possible, investing in the right instruments and retiring early, there are alternate views which make equal sense. I was intrigued by one such article [internet archive]. The author wonders what is the point of saving millions if you cannot enjoy it when you are retired because you are too old or not in good health. Instead, they suggest enjoying and spending money as soon as possible on the right things of course, instead of diligently saving for a future which may or may not come. No one knows how long they will live.
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Eco Friendly Pump House
After having decided to build a not so small pump house, we wondered if we should stretch our budget a little bit and go for eco friendly construction material. We have always wondered how it would be to live in a house constructed with mud bricks. Many say that it not only is eco friendly for several reasons, but also helps moderate temperature inside the house, keeping it cool during summers and warm during winters. We have only heard of the advantages but never experienced. We visited a couple of farmers who built their houses with mud bricks, but a one or two day experience does not tell you much. So we decided to build an eco friendly pump house and experience it ourselves.
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