Archive of posts from January 2021
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Dilemma Of An Upper Middle Class Parent
One of the things that I observed is that as kids move from middle class to upper middle class, the fire and hunger to achieve comes down. Kids in lower or middle class families have a thirst to learn and achieve that slowly mellows down as the lifestyle improves. Some how I feel they become more complacent.
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Learnings From 2020
The year 2020 has been special in many ways. We have seen something that was unprecedented not only in my life, but even during my parents life. Who would have ever imagined a lock-down of the whole nation for example? Many things were a first in 2020. While the year was not too bad, I did have a few learnings. In this last post (hopefully) in the year review series, I want to go over my learnings. Pretty much all my issues and the resulting lessons were related to Franklin :).
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Year In Review – 2020 Plans That Failed
From what you have seen so far in my year in review series, you might think 2020 was not too bad. It seems like most of the things worked out fine for me except for that loss of electronics and Franklin fiasco. But that is not really true. We made a few other plans that just did not go well at all. Here is a review of those disappointments.
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Year In Review – 2020 Investments and Redemptions
In the past few posts, I have written about my expenses, investment returns and net worth. In this post I want to show you my investment pattern over the last year. I will try to explain my weird investment behavior. A word of caution though. Do not copy my investment style. It will most likely do you more harm than good. The reason is quite simple. I am a retired person with no income. If I had a salary I would certainly invest differently (read more equity investments). I will most certainly do my monthly investments and not the random investments as you will soon see.
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Year In Review – 2020 Net Worth
Continuing on with the year in review series, next up is net worth. This year I wanted to make a small change to my net worth calculations. For the last 2 years I have included my US stocks (employee stocks) as part of my net worth. That has caused a lot of confusion to my readers. While my company stocks in the US are worth something, I am planning to keep it out of the reviews. That corpus is supposed to be used for my international (mostly US) vacation. So no point dragging it into net worth calculations.
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Year In Review – 2020 Daughter's Portfolio
You know that I am managing a small corpus for my daughter. Since there is no goal involved and it is an experiment, I decided to go all in with equity investments. The plan is to hand over the portfolio to my daughter when she become a major. This will be a nice experiment to check if my quest for low volatility portfolio coupled with market timing is any better than just blindly investing in equities. All I am really interested is in the returns as compared with my portfolio.
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Year In Review – 2020 Expenses
This is the continuation of my 2020 year in review series. See my previous post if you missed my returns report. As you probably already know, I maintain two set of expenses — one for monthly expenses and another for annual expenses. The monthly expenses include expenses that occur more frequently than once a year and the rest of the expenses go into annual expenses. Lets dive deeper into the report.
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Year In Review – 2020 Returns
At the start of every new year I review my portfolio and take stock of my expenses, returns and net-worth. So just like last year I am reviewing my returns for 2020. This is the first of the year in review series. I will also post my expenses and net-worth reviews in upcoming posts. Without wasting too much time, lets get right to it.
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Happy New Year 2021!
Wish you all a very happy new year! Hope this year brings you more health, happiness and prosperity. When I wrote the new year post last year, little did I know that things will change so quickly. We have gone through some turbulent times indeed. I've had my fair share of ups and downs, but on the whole I ended the year on a positive note. Without going into too much detail, let me recount what happened in my life in 2020.
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