Archive of posts from February 2022
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Why I Don't Have New Year Goals Anymore
I am the kind of person who really enjoys setting up goals and trying to achieve them. So every year before the start of a new year, I have a couple of goals that I’d like to achieve that year. Usually one goal is about health and fitness and another goal can be anything. This has been the case since 2008. But lately, I have stopped making new year goals. Now my goals are not aligned with the years any more. I just make a goal when I feel like and have an approximate target date and try to execute as best as I can.
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Year In Review – 2021 Net Worth
It has been a while but I just realized that I did not do my net worth analysis as part of my year in review series. So here we go. I am doing the net worth calculations using the very basic formula for net-worth which is basically
...continue readingassets - liabilities. Some don’t agree with that formula, but I will continue to use it since that is what I have used in the past. If I change the formula now, then there will be discontinuity in the numbers. Moreover, since I don’t publish any numbers, it does not matter what my net worth really is. It is only to show how it has grown over the years. My retirement is in no way dependent on my net worth. It is only dependant on my corpus of investments (debt MFs and equity MFs). Real estate is not an investment since I live in it. -
Repairs and Upkeep
Over the years I have been doing some repairs and upkeep of various things at home. Most of the things are simple and you probably already know them. But I thought I will just list some of the things I learned. My first piece of advice is that if something breaks, try to repair instead of replacing it. Most likely you are capable of repairing. You just don’t know it yet :). The internet is full of helpful people giving excellent advice on how to repair. What is the worst thing that can happen if you don’t know how to repair? You will break it further and then you can replace it, which is what you were planning to do anyway. You might have wasted a couple of Sunday afternoons trying to repair, but the knowledge you gain and the fun you have putting things together is amazing.
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Sensors Tell A Story
After having set up my solar panel, I installed a bunch of voltage and current sensors in various places to collect data about my power usage and also to keep track of how much solar energy is being generated. The plan was to optimize and maximize solar power usage. I want to eke out every bit of power from the panel and optimize the hell out of solar energy. I also wanted to build some visual artifacts (graphs) out of the data. If you are like me, crazy about data, and data analysis, then this post is for you.
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A Reader's Dilemma
From time to time I get emails from readers of my blog asking me for some advice or suggestions regarding their situation. Most of them are not unusual and a general advice does suffice. So usually they are not worthy of a blog post. But every once in a while you get some really interesting questions and that’s exactly what happened a few days ago. A reader wrote to me asking for some advice and I responded. Then I felt like it may be useful advice if there are others in a similar situation. Also I wrote a lot about my own thoughts about why I am unschooling my daughter and what the repercussions could be. So I thought I should copy-paste my response here in my blog. With the reader’s permission I am reproducing our conversation with some information redacted.
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Budget 2022 And How It Affects Me
Like last year, here is a quick overview of how the 2022 budget affects me. This is not an analysis or highlights of the budget. I am sure you can find many articles on those topics. This post is more specifically on how the budget affects my financial planning. This year’s budget has absolutely no affect on my financial planning. It is one of the shorter budget speeches. There were a lot of expectations from everyone and I wrote a post on that. Just as predicted, nothing happened. Every year, right before budget there is a lot of noise and anticipation. Budget day comes and goes and everyone is back to their routine :).
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Follow-up to Virtual Meetup #8
Thank you to everyone who joined the virtual meetup #8. Again a very low turn-up but we had some interesting discussions. This is a follow up to that meeting where I paraphrase and summarize what happened in the meet-up. I will not cover all the topics. Just the ones I felt that might help the readers or if I felt that I needed to add more clarity to my responses.
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Vehicle Insurance Craziness
There are many reasons one could think of when choosing a good car, and one of them could be insurance. Being a minimalist, I see car as a thing that takes me from point A to point B safely and protecting me from the elements (I was not like this before becoming a minimalist though). So whether it is raining or too hot, windy or dark, my vehicle should let me go from one place to another, assuming I have sufficient driving skills. For others a car could be a status symbol or it could be a shiny new toy with lots of bells and whistles. Have you heard about the refrigerator and foldable table in your car, or the wipers for your headlights? Well, some features do improve safety, but others are just gimmicks.
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