Archive of posts from May 2023
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Switched to NixOS
After using Manjaro Linux for a really long time, I finally decided it was time to switch to NixOS. Manjaro has been quite good until recently. Then there were some changes because of which my GPU hardware acceleration broke. I don’t remember all the details because it has been some time since I switched over to NixOS. All I remember is that video encoding is not able to use GPU acceleration and that was a big bummer. I tried EndeavourOS and liked it. Everything was working as expected. Yet I switched to NixOS. The reasons and more follow in this post. This is one of those posts with too many technical details, so if you prefer, feel free to skip this one.
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How Much Money Did My Solar Panels Save? - 2023 Edition
A long time ago I wrote a post on how much money my solar panel was saving me. In the post I promised to write another post in November 2022 with updates. Well, lots of things happened and I completely forgot about it until one reader reminded me requesting for an update. So here it goes. It has been more than 2 years since I installed a 320W solar panel and I have been diligently collecting data from my panel, our consumption and how much we are pulling from the grid. Very recently I finally finished my code to fetch the data, massage it and used some nice libraries to draw the graphs so I can analyze the data.
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Can Bard Answer Early Retirement Questions?
Ever since Chat-GPT was announced, I wanted to use it to ask personal finance questions just for kicks. But I was too lazy to sign up. Unfortunately by the time I decided to sign up, the page said it was full and asked me to wait. After a few weeks I heard about Chat-GPT integration with Bing and wanted to try it out. Unfortunately though it required me to sign up to a Microsoft account and wanted me to use Edge browser or something like that. I don’t remember all the reasons, but I am certainly not going to do any of that. I mean asking for email is one thing, but phone number even if it is for OTP is a no go for this kind of service. It is a lot more personal. Not that I don’t trust them with my data, it is mainly because I don’t want to increase the attack surface.
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Should You Sell Debt Or Equity For Retirement Expenses
After reading my post on “withdrawal plan in retirement”, one reader asked why I suggested that one should sell debt mutual funds to handle the retirement expenses. In that post I gave an example where an investor has only debt and equity mutual funds and in that scenario, it is preferable to sell debt mutual funds to handle everyday expenses and then do a rebalance once in a while to get the asset allocation to the ratio that you prefer. The reason for this recommendation is quite simple. It is to avoid selling mutual fund units of an asset class at their low point. Since equity mutual funds go up and down quite a bit in value, it is possible that in some years you might sell at a low point and dent your compounding effect. I will explain how with an example.
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Withdrawal Plan In Retirement
After my post on lumpsum vs SIP investment, a reader asked – “Wanted to understand the other side - how to redeem from our funds after we retire? Say we have calculated the number and we have enough. But, the challenge is how to get to a withdrawal mode from accumulation mode. You have showcased how you do it in some articles but can you do it with some numbers for a fictitious person? Ex: Age 40. Amount 6Cr spread across multiple equity and debt funds and US Stocks. Now, how to withdraw to last till their age of 85 for an expense of 1L per month (corpus is 50 times)?”. I thought it is an interesting question that needs answering. I will go with the numbers given by the reader and work out an example in this post.
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