Archive of posts from November 2021
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Fate Of Cryptocurrencies In India
Everyone must have heard the news by now. The Indian government will bring in the Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021, in the Winter Session of Parliament starting November 29. What is the big deal? It seems that the Bill will ban most of the private cryptocurrencies except a few. A lot of details about the Bill are not known. Yet people like to speculate. It is absurdly silly to talk about something when there is nothing to go by, but why should I be left behind? Let me throw in my proverbial 2 cents as well.
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Remark42 As Comments Engine In Jekyll
After having used Disqus as the comments engine for my Jekyll website for a week or so, I started to dislike it quite a bit due to several reasons. One of which is the requirement of creating an account with Disqus even if the user is logged in via one of the social logins such as Google or Twitter account. The other issue is the privacy aspect with Disqus. Seems like it is tracking too much information about the users. So I decided to use Remark42 instead. The only problem however is that I need to run a server to host it. It defeats the whole purpose of me going absolutely serverless. But I don’t have a choice since some of my readers want comments section.
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Financial Planning Workshop
I have recently done something that I haven’t done in the longest time – teach someone :). The last I remember teaching was way back in college and before that in 11th standard. And each time I had to teach an audience, it was because someone put me in the spot and not because of my own interest. In 11th is was because I was not paying attention to the class and when asked why I was not paying attention, I would give rude answers like “I already know it, I don’t want to listen”. I was sort of a rebel and generally a difficult student to teach. I guess may be the teachers wanted to show me how difficult it was to teach and asked me to solve some problems on the board and explain it to the class.
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Follow-up to Virtual Meetup #7
Thank you to everyone who joined the virtual meetup #7. We had a very low turn-up but we certainly had a lot of questions. This post is a follow-up to that meeting so you know what we discussed. As it usually happens, the topics we covered varied quite a bit from investment related things to solar panels to taxes.
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Should I Invest in Retail Direct Scheme
The minute I read about RBI launching retail direct scheme to allow retail investors to invest directly in the government bonds, I got excited. I have a huge portion of my investments in G-Sec (government securities) via various mutual funds. If there is a way I can invest directly with RBI, side stepping mutual funds, I could save on some expenses (expense ratio). Sounds good in theory, but will it work? Here are some of my initial thoughts on the scheme as applicable to me.
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How Much Money Did My Solar Panels Save?
It has been more than 6 month since I installed my lone 320W solar panel. So I wanted to check if it was doing me any favors and how much money is it saving. Normally one should wait for a full year to make any kind of useful analysis. But I get easily excited when it comes to doing any kind of data analysis and here I am at it again. It is a very small installation and hence the savings aren’t huge, but at least I am able to verify my predicted numbers (units of electricity) against the real numbers. Did I have any savings or was this whole solar panel project a waste of my time and money. Let’s find out.
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Adding Comments Section To Jekyll
As you know, I have recently migrated from Wordpress to static web hosting using Jekyll. But a couple of things were missing on my blog at that time. One was comments section and the other was a search feature. Since I moved to static web hosting, adding a comments engine was not possible. I did not want to add comments section anyway because there weren’t that many comments to start with and I also did not feel like a lot of interaction is happening anyway. Unfortunately a couple of folks noticed that the comments section was missing and were asking me about it. I thought no one would notice, but I was wrong. So I decided to add it grudgingly.
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What Was My Savings Rate
A lot of times while talking to people about my early retirement, I get to the point of someone wanting to know what percent of my income I was saving. Unfortunately I never tracked that metric. So I wanted to find that out myself which is what this post is all about. The information may not be very accurate but it should be a ballpark figure and has sufficient details in it. The reason for inaccuracy is primarily because I don’t want to track down all my investments and income to the minutest detail. That would take too much time. In fact I don’t even remember my salary information and used my ITR (income tax returns) as a guideline. Then I had to go through my CAMS statement to figure out my investments every year. Hope this helps answer the question about my savings rate.
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Virtual Meet-up #7
I'd like to invite you to join me in a virtual meet-up to discuss random things on the topics of financial planning, early retirement, home schooling or sustainable living. We can share our stories and ask each other questions or give suggestions. As a group we can learn from each other's experience, learnings and pit-falls. Since I post a lot about myself on this blog, you probably already know everything about me. But if you ever wanted to ask me something this is your chance!
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