In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. So in this post I will be covering my annual expenses in 2021. 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 laptop etc. Once I go over the expenses I will explain why we spent where and then we will move on to the budget for this year. Every year after retirement has been different with an interesting set of expenses that were never seen in the previous year. Last year wasn’t different either.


Expenses in 2021

My annual budget for 2021 was fixed at Rs. 3.6 lakhs and I spent about Rs. 2.7 lakhs. First lets take a look at where I was spending.



The biggest expense was Rs. 79K in miscellaneous expenses. These were mostly gifts for family as they visited us after a long time, all in thanks to a 2020 filled with lockdowns and travel restrictions. Beyond that there was a big Rs. 63K spending for laptops and related devices. If you remember, I bought a new laptop last year which cost me Rs. 51K. In addition I spent Rs. 5K to purchased a new battery for my old laptop because it was causing random problems.


Other than that, I purchase a laptop charger and a SSD for my mom’s laptop. Finally I purchased a gaming keyboard and mouse! Yeah that happened too. I was so excited with my gaming laptop and getting back to my gaming life, I thought I will pamper myself with a brand new gaming keyboard and mouse. I still have to get around to writing about that in this blog. Anyway, all that put together, I arrived at Rs. 63K spent on laptops category.


The next big expense was in projects category where I spent Rs. 56K. You already know that I started the solar panel project which cost me Rs. 15K in expenses directly related to the project. In addition, there were some ancillary expenses of about Rs. 4K in the form of arduino boards, relays and other electronics that I used to optimize the usage of solar power and also to collect a ton of data. I also bought some tools like clamp meter and spanners which cost about Rs. 4K.


The biggest expense in the projects category was of course the batteries. I don’t think I wrote a post on this, but perhaps I should write one. Basically my 10 year old UPS batteries were performing poorly which I had to replace. The cost was Rs. 27K for two 150 AH C10 batteries after exchanging the old batteries. Other than that there were some other minor expenses like domain name cost of this blog etc in the projects category.


The house expenses category as you can imagine contains mostly expenses related to upkeep of our house. These include house tax, replacing water motor controller (which broke after some 5 years), replacing broken electricity meter, replacing curtains and bulbs etc.


Entertainment expenses include amazon prime subscription, purchase of some PC games and more importantly purchasing a 8 TB hard drive which cost Rs. 14K. My media center HDD crashed. That drive is where I keep all my photos, music and videos. It is like a NAS for my whole house so anyone could be watching or listening to any media on any device. Normally my HDDs last at least 5 years, and this one died almost exactly after 5 years :). Thankfully I have another 8 TB drive which has all the backup so there wasn’t a whole lot of data loss really.


In electronics expenses, I purchased a phone for my mom and a few other small electronic devices like micro SD card and USB drives. Other than that, most other expenses are just too small to enumerate. The self improvement expense is for some class that my wife attended.


Budget for 2022

For those of you who follow my blog and read carefully between the lines know that I usually don’t increase my annual budget every year like I do for my monthly budget. I plan to increase it only once every 5 years because these annual expenses occur less frequently. So the budget for this year remains at Rs. 3.6 lakhs per year. If all that sounds confusing, you might want to read my post on annual expenses explained. Anyway, here are the cumulative expenses for 2020-2021 (both inclusive).



As you will note, I have exceeded my budget in the categories of miscellaneous, laptops / desktops and projects. The last two are expected because hopefully I will not have those expenses in the next 3 years and so on average I might be within the budget. The only unexpected part is in miscellaneous expenses. I might have under budgeted on that one. We will only know after 2024 and if required I will increase it for the 2025-2029 budget :).


One thing I did not mention in this post is my tax expense. I paid a bunch of taxes both in the form of advance tax and self assessment tax all in thanks to Franklin returning my money. That was my biggest expense and it was the most unexpected one. I did not anticipate unexpected tax expenses pre-COVID when I made the budgets. Anyway, that is life. While I did not show the taxes in my cash flow, it does appear on my balance sheet so it is not gone anywhere, I am just not showing it because it will reveal too much about my investments. Well, that is it about my annual expenses. Until next year!