Eight Years In Financial Independence
Happy new year 2026 everyone. It is now more than 8 years since we became financially independent! Can’t believe how time flies. At the end of December 2017, I was super excited that we finally reaching my goal of financial independence according to my calculations at that time. Now it is already 8 years past that milestone. These last few years have been as liberating and peaceful as I had hoped for.
Many things have happened since then, but it will take for ever for me to go over each of them. In fact a lot of things have happened just in the last year. That alone is a long story if explain in full. I will try to be as brief as possible while trying to explain what happened in 2025.
My Projects
Blog
For starters, I decided to reduce the amount of time I spend on the blog on April fools day! It was meant to be an amalgamation of a joke and reality. While I was churning out 50 posts a year in 2024, the number of posts in 2025 fell down to 28 and will further fall down this year.
Home Automation
Personally I have and still am spending a lot of time on my favorite hobby project – home automation. Moved a lot of code that I wrote for arduino boards to Home Assistant and ESPHome on ESP devices. Earlier, my favorite board used to Arduino Nano. Since moving to Home Assistance, I am now using ESP 8266 or ESP 32 for all my projects and automations. I have been contemplating moving to Home Assistant since 3 years, but never really got enough time to experiment.
As part of the upgrade, I had to rebuild a lot of my hardware with new components. Added better sensors for motion detection (mmWave), light, temperature, pressure and humidity measurements. Replaced all my hall effect sensors for DC current measurements with more robust shunt resistor based sensors. Changed communication between devices from bluetooth (Arduino Nano + HC-05) with wifi (ESP 8266 and ESP 32). Changing all my code, documentation, circuit diagrams, etc takes time.
Moving from bluetooth to wifi created other problems like wifi range not being sufficient. So I repurposed my old routers to become wifi extenders. So now I have 3 routers instead of the one I used to have earlier. Eventually, I plan to move to a more robust mesh network. Bought a few power/energy measurement sensors to track power usage including a USB power sensor.
Home Lab
Likewise, I have been dreaming of setting up a Home Lab for more than 3 years. I wanted to try out containers but again, time was not on my side. I know it is funny coming from a person who is retired. But you will be surprised at how many things come up once you have free time to take up all of that free time.
Anyway, initially I wanted to buy a small mini PC with enough RAM, but still a low powered processor (because it will run 24x7) for my Home Lab. But then I thought if this whole Home Lab thing does not work out then it will be a waste. Instead, I wanted to get my feet wet first with my existing low powered media center PC. It has only 4 GB RAM so I wondered if it can handle many containers. Moreover it is ARM64 based, so I did not know if I will be able to find containers that I want for that architecture. I was proven wrong on all accounts.
I really enjoyed this journey. Currently, in spite of being such a small machine, my media center PC is running 10 containers 24x7 and another 3 containers that I bring up as needed. While my machine still has 50% RAM free, I wanted to upgrade to a PC with more RAM since I wanted to try out Music Assistant. And it required a beefier machine. Then I found out that the prices of RAM are ridiculous, so I gave up the idea for now until the prices come down.
Expenses in Actual Budget
Since starting my own Home Lab, I have switched over tracking expenses and budget from a spreadsheet into actual budget running locally on my Home Lab machine. This has vastly improved my experience tracking expenses and budget. I can run reports, search for expenses and do analysis way easier than I ever was able to do using just plain old spreadsheets.
However, this transition from spreadsheets to actual budget took some time because I had to export and import data in a certain way. Along the journey I found a bunch of recording irregularities and missing expenses which I fixed. The result is that my reports may look a little bit different from what you are used to from my past year in review posts.
Rewrote investments apps
If you remember, I wrote a couple of web apps that tracks my investments and lets me do analysis on them and also figure out taxes for me. Well, I wrote that code some 10 years ago in NodeJS and maintaining it and adding new code was becoming increasingly difficult as I rarely program in javascript anymore. Since Flutter is the new hotness that I am currently coding in, I decided to rewrite the apps.
While rewriting it, I added several new features too. For one, all the graphs related to projection vs corpus, projection vs inflation etc were all done using data from spreadsheets earlier. Now, I import data from Actual Budget using their (sadly NodeJS) API and build all the graphs in my new Flutter app. This again means that the graphs in “year in review” posts will be different going forward. More importantly, I still have a lot more features to add. Moreover, there is one more app that I need to do a full rewrite in Flutter. So I know 2026 is going to be a busy year again.
Music app
More than 15 year ago, I wrote a Java server and android client app which work together to create a radio like music experience for me using my local music. Basically I have a large music collection and the Java server app will scan my collection and whenever any android clients connect to it, it sends a few music tracks that I have not listened to recently. Anyway, I wanted to port the client app to my media center PC as well. So I wrote a Kodi add-on which connects to my Java server and requests for fresh music content so I can listen to music on my home surround sound system and not just on my phone or in car. I fondly call this add-on as “re-ynd music” which I integrated into my Home Assistant.
Kodi Remote App
I wrote a Kodi remote app some 10 year ago in android. Unfortunately the API used to communicate with Kodi have changed. Since most of the app really is just calling APIs, I have to rewrite a lot of code. I took this opportunity to rewrite the android app written in Java into what else but flutter :). I tried some vibe coding on this project and got some of the API related code written by Gemini. Not bad actually.
Solar Panel
We bought a new solar panel because our electricity usage went over 200 units on a particular month when we had family and guests at the same time in the summer (although we don’t have any air conditioners). So I had to pay one electricity bill in 2025. Since we were anyway planning to buy an electric scooter, I thought it may not be a bad idea to add another solar panel. That came with it’s own difficulties and I had to change some hardware and automations because of it.
Financial Planning
A couple of our home schooling friends hired me as their paid financial planner for a year to plan their finances. So I have been busy preparing plans, strategies, projection, mutual fund accounts, recommendations etc for them. Their 1 year plans end around March and September 2026. So until then I am busy with that work as well. Hopefully, I won’t have to do beyond the 1 year :). It is not like I don’t enjoy it, but it is taking away my time (well I am getting paid so it is ok I guess).
In addition there is the usual one off requests from friends asking for financial advice and mutual fund recommendations too.
Fitness Trainer
I have started training a friend (online) to get them fit. Again, a paid gig, and again I enjoy it, but it is taking away some of my time. There is no time frame set, so I am not sure how long this will go. It is just month on month until I get bored or our friend gives up on my demanding exercises :).
That is most of my project related updates. There several other small projects that I completed last year, but this post is already too long. These are the things that keep me so busy that I had to give up writing my blog too.
Health and Fitness
This is going well. I got badly injured once and mildly injured another time but nothing to complain about. When one is crazy about fitness one tends to push the body to the limit and injuries are a part of it sometimes. I don’t mind it.
Unschooling
This is also going well. We still follow very lenient, no structure eduction system. Our daughter does what she likes on most days. She goes to school the other days. She is enjoying the couple of days at school, doing dramas, dancing, going on excursions etc. She is still way below her school going friends level when it comes to education, but that is not our concern. She is way happier than most of her peers too :).
Finances
The year 2025 was not too bad on our finances. Anyway you will read more about it in my upcoming “year in review” series, so no point jumping the gun.
Other Things
As you already know, we bought a new electric scooter which replaced our 15 year old petrol scooter. I enjoyed studying the scooter, its manual and every detail about it :).
During the year, our 9 year old LED TV conked out. I took this opportunity to purchase a new LG OLED TV. I have been wanting to buy an OLED TV for a long time. I keep hearing people rave about the true color and black reproduction and they are not at all exaggerating. The picture quality is really really good. But OLED being what it is, I have to worry about burn in issues. So I wrote a couple of automations in Home Assistant to keep it safe.
I can keep going, but I guess this is already a long post so I will stop here. I am not sure how many of you have read till the end, but thanks for reading. Wish me luck for another year in financial independence.