Archive of posts from February 2025


  • Feb 22, 2025

    Stock Market Is Down By 20%

    Yes, stock market is down once again. But what else is new anyway? It is doing it’s job going up and down as it likes. We are the only ones anticipating or hoping it would always go up. Anyway, the reason I am writing this post is not because of the market correction in the recent past. I don’t analyze why the markets go up or why they fall because most of the times it is unpredictable. In spite of various news reports trying to answer why the markets behaved the way they did, most of them don’t get it right. Whether we know the “why” or not, we do want to know how it effects our portfolio.

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  • Feb 15, 2025

    Pump House With Backyard

    Initially when we first decided to build a pump house, it was supposed to be just a small storage area. The plan was that this was going to be a small temporary building to be used to store all the pipes and fittings required to develop the farm. Later, once we have planted everything and when we are closer to moving to the farm permanently, we were supposed to build a proper farm house and move to that house. At least that was the plan. But as we were designing the pump house and adding more and more stuff like bathroom and a car parking place, it felt like this may not be a temporary place after all. Of course it will not be our retirement home, but we thought may be if we make a few more design changes, may be we can make it a livable space for some temporary visits to the farm.

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  • Feb 8, 2025

    Year In Review - 2024 Returns

    The last update in the year in review series is on my returns in 2024. In the short run, the returns might seem high or low, but in the long run it should match my expectation of 10%. That was the assumption I used when I decided to retire early. As long as I can keep my expenses inflation to around 6% and my returns to around 10%, I should be able to manage to live a decent retired life. Since it has only been about 7 years since my financial independence, there isn’t a lot of data to go with. My long term inflation is currently slightly less than 4%, so that is all good. What about my returns? Are they at least 10%?

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  • Feb 1, 2025

    Pump House With Car Parking

    As I mentioned in the earlier posts, we decided to build a pump house near our bore location. Initially we thought we will build something small enough to hold the starter and some pipes. Then we decided to add a bathroom. Next we decided to increase our budget and go for eco friendly bricks. At this point, we thought we should get a quotation for how much it would cost to get this much work done before changing the designs further. The contractor we chose, asked us to provide us a design with all the doors, windows, wall heights, room dimensions in sqft. etc planned out so he can give an accurate estimate. If you remember, I initially designed the pump house using SketchUp, but it lacked a lot of details. So I went about looking for another software that can do room planning.

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