Archive of posts from August 2024


  • When Warranty Works

    We have a warranty on a product for various reasons. But I rarely found any warranty useful because either the product never has any problems, or it develops problems soon after the warranty expires. The later happens quite a bit with phones and laptops for me. Not sure how. So I find it very amusing when a product actually fails before warranty and gets replaced with a new one because it was under warranty. That happened a few days ago and it was like that once in a lifetime feeling. Of course the cost of the product is so low that there is nothing really to celebrate, but it is still something.

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  • Purchased A New TV To Help Reduce Electricity Bills

    For all the claims I make about us being minimalists, we actually spend a lot. A few months back I decided to buy (yet) another TV. As if we already did not have enough in the house. We already have one large TV in the living room and one more old TV in my parents bedroom because my dad likes to watch TV quite a bit. He gets very bored when our parents visit us here in Bangalore. He doesn’t have much social activity like how he has back in my hometown where I grew up. He has a lot of social connections there. After setting up an old 32” TV connected to a Android TV box, he would happily browse youtube videos when he got bored. This was working fine until the ruling party changed in Karnataka and the new party came with Gruha Jyoti scheme. So I thought I should buy one more TV to reduce electricity bill and take advantage of the scheme. Yeah, that statement sounds contradictory, so let me explain.

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  • Farm Registration

    In a previous post, I wrote about how we arranged money to buy the farm. It was a long and arduous process as it tested our patience. However, we later found out that the pain we have to go through and the patience required is just the beginning :). Anyway, I ended the previous post with us asking our real estate agent Mr. J to start the registration process. He has been very helpful in getting all the documents prepared and visiting the taluk office etc. After a few failed dates for registration, he finally fixed one date that worked for us. He gave us all the instructions and explained the process involved and said it would all be done in a few hours. We won’t even have to step into the office until the signature time. I was feeling upbeat about the registration.

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  • Reached A Milestone

    We have finally reached an important milestone! But not in a good way :(. While we are sort of minimalists, we still spend quite a bit. As a result, we recently reached a milestone of Rs. 50 lakhs spent on various expenses since we became financially independent in January 2018. Generally people should be proud of their achievements, but this is not one of them :). Still, it is not all too bad. According to my projections of expenses I should have reached the Rs. 50L lakhs milestone by end of 2022, yet we did not reach it until July 2024. So not too bad.

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  • How To Spend Time

    While everyone understands the value of time, very few actually value time. We are careful with spending money, but not careful how we spend time. Have you ever wondered where you spend your time in a day? I read a very nice article on the perspective of time which got me started on writing this post. This is definitely not a repeat or summary of that post. While I touch upon some points written over there, I am going to do an account of how I spend my time based on what is written there. So please read that first.

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