Archive of posts from June 2024
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Six Years In Retirement
I cannot believe that it is already six years since I retired early. I retired exactly on this day in 2018. In these 6 years I have seen several interesting things, met a variety of people, changed our lifestyle and health in more ways than one. It was a good ride. Of course it might not have been any different even if I was working but things would not have felt so leisurely and I certainly wouldn’t have time to write about it. The finances are going as per plan. Physical health is fine. Coming to things I wanted to do after retirement, or as I like to call as hobby projects have been going amazingly well. Even better than I originally planned and I still have a lot more to look forward to. But best of all, I am thoroughly enjoying the time I get to spend with my daughter. I also have more time for family and friends too.
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A Farm By Any Other Name
I love the quote by Steve Jobs “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. You have to believe that the dots will connect and that will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path and that will make all the difference.”. We had absolutely no idea that somehow, our decision to unschool our kid, quitting the rat race, minimizing our lifestyle and retiring early will lead us to our dream of owning a farm. There are so many dots that eventually connected. But at the time when we were making those decisions which led us off the well worn path, we had no idea that they will connect. After all the many twists and turns, we eventually found a farm that we loved and knew that it has our name written on it.
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Should We Go With 3% Rule?
I recently wrote a post about asset allocation in which a reader commented whether we should be using 3% safe withdrawal rate in Indian context instead of the 4% safe withdrawal rate that is generally accepted in the US (at least in the past). The commenter also provided a video supporting the 3% rule. I strongly encourage you to watch that first. It makes some good arguments. If you are interested, I’d also suggest you read the paper which contains all the details, assumptions, data and methodology used for the simulations. According to the research paper, it is recommended that one should go with a 3% safe withdrawal rate instead of the generally well known 4% rate.
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How Not To Teach
So this other day, me and my daughter were watching a video where the author was talking about infinity and how if you divide a number by zero you get infinity. My daughter could not understand how anything can be divided into zero parts. Or how attempting to divide something into zero parts blows up into this huge number that we call infinity. Being the smart alec that I am, I thought I could explain her how division works and how something divided by zero gives you infinity. As you can imagine, I made a huge mess of it and it showed me how little I knew about teaching to kids. If you take pleasure in seeing a grown man fumble with math, go on.
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Is The Stock Market Peaking?
I am a little bit concerned. The stock market has been giving great returns for the past 3 years or so. Since the COVID-19 pandemic there has never been a long drawn bear market scenario. How long can this continue? On top of it, I see more and more people getting involved in trading. Some are even quitting their jobs to do trading full time. Generally, when there is euphoria in the market, you see these kind of events happening. New traders, who think they are investors and think they have the know how, enter the stock market just as the market starts peaking. Then, armed with a bunch of algorithms based on back testing, start to do algo trading. When you see more and more of these people, you know the time has come for the market to crash.
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