Archive of posts from December 2023


  • Dec 25, 2023

    Our First Step Towards True Retirement - Part 1

    If you have been paying attention to the last few posts, you know that we are cutting down our sustainability efforts here at home. We first stopped rain water harvesting. Then slowly started to reduce our organic gardening footprint. None of these decisions were taken on a whim. They were deliberate and well thought out. While I mentioned some of the reasons for slowing down the projects, one reason which I did not mention was that we were not finding enough time. Yes I know, it sounds strange coming from a person who (and his better half) have completely retired and have not worked for money for more than 5 years. Yet, here we are. We finally realized our long-held dream of becoming owners of a farm and that kept us busy.

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  • Dec 18, 2023

    Terrace Gardening Update

    There are three places where we have been doing organic gardening. One on either sides of the house, two on the terrace and three outside of our compound wall. I already gave an update on the garden on either sides of the house. Since I’d like to keep you guys up to date, in this post I am giving an update on the terrace garden and the garden that is outside. Now for the bad news. We recently stopped doing the terrace gardening. There are a few reasons which I will get to in a minute. Meanwhile, our outside garden is still doing fine, but not to the level we want.

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  • Dec 11, 2023

    A Confusing Time In Stock Market

    The Indian stock market has been unrelenting in its growth. It feels like yesterday when I wrote that Sensex crossed the 60,000 milestone. Now, just 2 years later it is about to cross 70,000. But there is nothing impressive about it because that is a relatively low growth rate of 8%. Hardly anything to write about since we expect markets to do at least double digit growth. What is really impressive is that the market doubled in just three and a half years, which is a solid 22% growth. In June 2020, Sensex was around 35,000. The long term Sensex returns are around 13-14%. So should we be worried about a market crash?

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  • Dec 5, 2023

    Lessons From 30 Years

    Charlie Munger passed away recently at 99 years of age, just 34 days away from reaching 100. His life lessons are timeless and worth learning. If you have any interest in finance and investing you surely must have heard of him. He is the business partner and a good friend of Warren Buffett. As a result you must have seen blogs or emails about his famous quotes and life lessons. I did not want to bore you again with the same quotes. Instead, I recently came across a blog post on 40 lessons from 30 years. I thought it was interesting and wanted to see if I agree with any of them and how I measured up in my life. You should read the post and see if it applies to you too.

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