Archive of posts from June 2019
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One Year Into Retirement
It is now exactly one year since I retired on June 29, 2018. Incidentally, this also happens to be my 50th post on this blog! It was a fun journey so far. While I cannot say if this will continue into the future, there are some exciting times ahead. Everything is going almost exactly the way I planned. Still, since I haven't yet gone through a bad market cycle, I don't yet know if my financial planning will stand the test of time. One thing I realized is that no matter how much free time you create, it will get filled with something and you always feel like you are busy (at least that is how it is for me). I did not have a single boring day in the past year in retirement. Most days are uneventful, so it is not like there is something crazy happening everyday. Yet, I haven't felt like there is any free time. So what happened in this one year in retirement?
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Motivation Towards a Goal
Early retirement is possible. It is certainly not easy, but it is simple. Of course, it needs a lot of sacrifices today, for a better tomorrow. You need to save a lot which means your expenses have to be very less to have any meaningful contribution to your retirement kitty. Heck, retiring at 60 with enough corpus to last your whole life is in itself a difficult task. How can you even save for your early retirement. It all comes down to how deeply you want to retire early. It does not just apply for retirement, but anything in life. If you want something very desperately, it automatically tunes not just your conscious, but your subconscious self to work towards it. At that point, none of what you are giving up, or all the hard work you are putting in will feel burdensome. It just feels like a flow and before you realize, you have hit your goal. So ask yourself, is your desire to retire early really strong? Make it a goal only if you have the strongest urge. A goal without enough motivation is hard to realize.
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Updating OS in Google Compute Engine
A few days ago, I decided to update my Google Compute Engine instance which was running an older Debian version. This was the same instance that is hosting this WordPress blog, so I had to be careful not to break anything lest I lose all the data and/or the service can be down. This post is a recount of my journey through the update process because I found some interesting things about Google Compute Engine (GCE) and how things can break if you are not careful and how things can go very smoothly if you plan properly.
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Am I Financially Ready To Retire?
Here is an alternative take on whether you are financially ready to retire. In this post, I want to help you determine if you are ready to quit with nothing but a simple calculator and just one formula. You don't need to predict expenses, inflation, rate of return etc, and as such, this method is not as comprehensive as the How Soon Can I Retire calculator. So take it with a pinch of salt and use it more as an indicator of whether you are ready to retire or not. Also note that this is only to check if you are financially fit to retire and has nothing to do with your emotional state of mind. Some may have a lot of money and yet cannot retire due to various other reasons (including not knowing what to do post retirement, fear of boredom, peer pressure, family disapproval, social status etc).
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