Posts in category "early-retirement" - page 4
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On Goal Setting
Setting goals is a great motivator to get things done. Without a goal, life goes on without much excitement and nothing to look forward to or work towards. But if you have a goal that is too hard or takes too long to achieve it may actually be demotivating. How do you get out of this situation. Simple, have a long term goal and then have a few smaller, shorter incremental goals.
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How And Who Should Pay Advance Tax
I just payed my second installment of advanced tax, so I thought I will write down the procedure. It will be like a reference for me in the future and might help some one as well. It is actually a pretty simple process that does not really warrant a post, but here we go anyway.
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Risks Of Wrong Financial Planning
It is now more than 2 years since I officially retired. But unofficially I have retired in Jan 2018. I had accumulated the required retirement corpus by Dec 2017 and I could retire at the beginning of 2018. But for reasons best described in one of my earliest posts, I decided to delay my retirement date by 6 months. The way I decided when I was ready to quit was based on the 4% rule. Since it's been only 2.5 years, I can't say for sure if the 4% rule is working or not. We will have to wait and see at least 10 years really. But ideally you will have to wait until I am dead to see if the corpus really lasted that long.
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Two Years Into Retirement
This is going to be a really short post. I just completed 2 years in retirement! On this exact day in 2018, I was commuting back to home from work for the last time. It was one of the happiest day of my life. Nothing much has changed from what I have already wrote in my post after 1 year into retirement. The only thing that has changed is that I am going through a bad market cycle for the first time since I started investing in 2011. Hopefully I will come out strong after this.
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Goal Based Investing
So far I have been giving financial advice for the singular goal of early retirement. But many of you probably have multiple goals. May be you want to buy a house, save up for kids education or planning an international vacation in a couple of years. Whatever might be your goal, you need to have a financial plan. Each goal needs to have a different corpus, asset allocation and redemption plan. If you rather watch a video on the same topic, check out the YouTube video at the end of the post.
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My Talk On Early Retirement
I gave a talk on Financial Planning for Early Retirement a few weeks ago at my previous work place. It was well received with more than 100 attendees. I was actually not planning to give a talk. I casually wanted to visit the old office and visit some folks over lunch. But they wanted a talk, so I had to quickly make some slides. Fortunately, most of what I wanted to say was already available on my blog. Made some slides based on my experience and blog and gave a talk on June 14, 2019. I enjoyed giving the talk and hope my colleagues enjoyed it as much. There was a sharp spike in the number of visitors to my blog and LinkedIn page a day or two after the talk.
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Am I Financially Ready To Retire?
Here is an alternative take on whether you are financially ready to retire. In this post, I want to help you determine if you are ready to quit with nothing but a simple calculator and just one formula. You don't need to predict expenses, inflation, rate of return etc, and as such, this method is not as comprehensive as the How Soon Can I Retire calculator. So take it with a pinch of salt and use it more as an indicator of whether you are ready to retire or not. Also note that this is only to check if you are financially fit to retire and has nothing to do with your emotional state of mind. Some may have a lot of money and yet cannot retire due to various other reasons (including not knowing what to do post retirement, fear of boredom, peer pressure, family disapproval, social status etc).
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How to Choose a Debt Mutual Fund
Hopefully you have read my post on how to choose a mutual fund. This post is kind of an extension to it. I will specifically explain what things you need to look for when picking a debt mutual fund as opposed to the general advice given in the other post. While I don't consider myself an expert, I will give you some tips based on my experience. But first, the usual disclaimer:
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Record Your Expenses
In my previous posts, you have seen my monthly and annual budgets. Now it is time I explained how I actually track and record my expenses, so I know how I am performing compared to the budgeted numbers.
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How to Choose a Mutual Fund
We've all heard it -- don't choose a mutual fund just based on past performance or star rating. Then, how does one go about choosing a good fund? That is the question I want to answer today. While I am not expert at picking a good mutual fund, I did have my share of bad pickings and hence have had some wisdom knocked into me. So here are some tips on how to choose a good mutual fund based on my experience.
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