Posts in category "early-retirement" - page 2


  • It Is All In The Mindset

    Early retirement is not for everyone and I have written an article a long time ago about it. It is completely normal if you don’t want to retire early or even ever. Some enjoy working for many reasons, which I may not understand, just the way some don’t understand why anyone should retire early. And then there are some who are in between. Again there are many reasons for them to not be able to jump ship and join the early retirement bandwagon. Some reasons are very legit like not having big enough salary or having too many dependents and thus expenses, or family not in agreement etc. Then there is a minority who in spite of having enough are unable to retire early.

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  • Retiring In A Bear Market

    I already wrote a bunch of posts about 4% rule on my blog. Most recently I explained how early retirement might work during a prolonged recession. You have also seen how 4% rule is working out for me. Then there is that topic about whether 4% rule actually works in India given the high inflation, which we found out might actually work better in India. But then why should we stop the discussion there? Let us talk about retiring in a bear market. Actually I am not going to do any analysis, but will just point you to an interesting article I read recently.

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  • Retiring Early During A Recession

    A reader asks “Can you write a post on how early retirement works in a bear market (potential recession) scenario going for say 1-2 more years earning less than 10% or even say 6%. Meaning a real return of 0% as per your assumption. What kind of planning should folks who have already retired and folks who are planning can take. Keeping a good buffer is definitely one option but any other thoughts to discuss there (fixed income vs equity balance or others) will be great to see”. So lets see what it takes to be retired in this situation and if there is something we can do to reduce the impact of an unexpected long recessionary climate.

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  • 4% Rule In Indian Context

    I have already written a few posts on 4% rule, but some readers were not sure if it really works in Indian context. We don’t have the equivalent of the Trinity study (which resulted in the 4% rule) done here in India. Or at least I am not aware of one. For those of you who don’t know the Trinity study, I will brief you on it. Basically the study found that if you withdraw 4% from your retirement account every year after accounting for inflation your retirement fund should last 30 years or more. But the study was done in the US using bond, inflation and equity market data from 1925 to 1995. It is really not a rule as much as a thumb rule. While I don’t have the luxury of such nice data for India, in this post, I will attempt to use some crude data loosely based on the same notion.

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  • My Thoughts On Early Retirement

    This is a continuation of my previous post regarding email conversations I had with a reader of my blog. The reader wanted to know if they can retire early given that they have already achieved financial independence. I am republishing our conversation in the hopes that it will help some of you. It is not about my replies which are probably not as useful, but more about the reader’s dilemma and may be others have better advice which you can leave in the comments below. So without much ado, here is the conversation with some information redacted to protect the privacy of the reader.

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  • Should I Retire Early?

    As you probably know, I sometimes get emails from the readers of my blog asking for advice or giving me suggestions. I find some of the emails to be interesting and intriguing and would like to publish my conversation with them as an article in the hopes that it might help others who are in similar situations. In the past I have posted one such article about a reader’s dilemma. A few days ago, another reader reached out to me asking for some advice. Now I don’t know how useful my advice is, but I give them anyway :). I just hope it helps them. I thought our conversation was interesting and wanted to post it so if others have any advice they too could suggest something in the comments. So with the person’s permission I am reproducing most of our email conversation redacting some information to respect their privacy.

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  • Financial Independence Trend

    There has been a sharp rise in the F.I.R.E. trend in the recent past. For those who don’t know, F.I.R.E stands for financial independence and retire early. It is the new fad in town which I am also part of :). In the past, people searching for financial independence used to trend around 20 queries a day on Google search. It has more than tripled if you look at the data from the last one year. I wonder why so many are looking for financial independence. Perhaps COVID-19 and the resulting work from home culture are to blame. Or may be the sudden rise in wealth because of the recent stock market bull run is the cause. I have no idea, but people seem to be more interested in F.I.R.E in the recent past more than before. Or at least that is what Google trends is indicating.

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  • The Time I Wished I Was Working

    In the 4 odd years since I retired, I never felt like I was missing out on my salary, except for during this period. The stock markets are falling and RBI has started hiking interest rates. Which means that NAV of both debt mutual funds and equity mutual funds are falling. That only means one thing – invest more! Unfortunately since I don’t get salary or any other income anymore, I have to sell some mutual funds and buy another. Normally I do this by selling the mutual funds that are gaining and buying the mutual funds that are falling. Here I am not talking about individual funds. I am talking about the type or category of mutual funds.

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  • How Is Your Portfolio Doing?

    When ever the market falls, people are curious about my portfolio. They want to know how my portfolio is handling the crash (according to them). I shrug my shoulders and reply “same old”. Yes, that is pretty much my attitude whether the market is going up or down or under. The portfolio is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Actually, to tell you the truth, the market is certainly not crashing. It is just a correction, at least so far. May be if it falls a lot more from here, I may call it a crash.

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  • Changes After Retirement

    It is interesting how things change after you have achieved some goals. Take for example my goal of early retirement. When I was still in the journey of accumulating wealth to eventually retire, I was hell bent on learning everything about investments and stocks. At the time I started with the basics like having adequate insurance and emergency funds etc. Then I taught myself about asset classes, asset allocation and rebalancing. Next I moved on to learning about macro economics, market cycles and behavioral economics taking several classes on Coursera, EdX and Udacity. Eventually took a class in accounting and finance as well. The hope was that I will eventually be able to analyze businesses and invest in stocks directly.

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