Archive of posts from January 2023
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Five Years In Financial Independence
It has been more than five years since we became financially independent. It was end of 2017 when we concluded that we have enough investments to call it a day and hang our boots. It felt like life would be awesome and we can enjoy living a slow life. Which is exactly we did for the past five years and we have absolutely zero regrets regarding early retirement. We are living the life at the slowest pace we have ever done. There is barely any urgency in any matter of our life. No wonder so many people ask – what do you do with all the free time?
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Year In Review - 2022 Returns
Continuing on in the year in review series, I now take a look at my returns in 2022. Although this is not really important since investments are for long term and there is no point looking at returns every year, I like to review it nonetheless. Last year, the stock market contrary to its general nature, did nothing interesting really. It was mostly flat with the market touching the peak around January and went down to the lows in June and back up by December. In the end, most of the indices that I track have ended slightly higher than where they started the year. My corpus performed inline with the indices, nothing too high or low. Enough talking lets start by comparing my portfolio returns with some of those indices.
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Year In Review - 2022 Annual Expenses
In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. This is the continuation of that post and I will be covering my annual expenses in 2022. While monthly expenses are those kind of expenses that occur more frequently, yearly expenses occur rarely, perhaps once every few years like house repairs or buying a new car etc. I will explain where we are spending the most and why. Remember that for all the expenses, whether monthly or annual, the money is coming out of my retirement corpus which consists of a bunch of debt and equity mutual funds. There are no other incomes or special savings for annual expenses. Every year since retirement we have seen different kinds of expenses and last year wasn’t any different either.
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Year In Review - 2022 Monthly Expenses
You already know about the two kinds of expenses that I track – monthly and annual expenses. You probably also know that I publish my expense report for the past year and mull over it a bit. Then I create a new budget for the expenses for current year. Following the tradition, here is a post about my monthly expenses in 2022 and the budget for 2023.
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Year In Review 2022
Happy new year to the readers of my blog. I know that statement becomes stale quite quickly. Like every year, I reflect upon the events that happened over the last year and write a short summary of how things went and where I can improve for this year. Of course, every year is different with new challenges and events, so the learnings don’t always easily translate to the new one, but we should at least try :). Compared to 2021, the previous year was considerably better. There were no more crazy COVID-19 waves and people’s movement and businesses footfalls have gone back to their pre-covid levels. That is the good news in general at a global level. The bad news of course is the Russia Ukraine war and the persistently high inflation all over the world. In addition to that, I have my own highlights and lowlights at a personal level. Let me unwrap them quickly for you.
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