Posts in category "post-retirement"


  • Music System Frequency Response

    Although I am not an audiophile, I am a critical listener and I can tell when the sound quality is not up to the mark. While I like my current 5.1 music system setup, I still feel like it could do better. I spend about 70% of the time listening to music and about 30% of the time watching movies, or TV shows or live TV. So a major part of my listening is music. Generally I like a very flat response from my speakers. I don’t like overly bright sound in general. A slightly warm sound is acceptable, but prefer the frequency response to be flat so I can listen to music as the original author intended it. So I decided to check the frequency response of my speakers.

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  • Solar CCTV Installation

    Our real estate agent and friend Mr. J suggested that we install a CCTV before doing anything else in the farm. Neither he nor we were know about possibility of theft in the area. But while talking to a few of our other farmer friends, some of them have had a bad experience with theft. So having a CCTV there seemed like a good idea if for nothing but to act as a deterrent. Since we are not going to live in the farm yet, anything we buy for the farm like pipes or pump etc, can be easy targets for theft. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the farmers these days are neither innocent nor god fearing nor humble nor moral nor ethical or any of the other positive adjectives you normally associate with farmers.

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  • Electricity Connection Application

    After getting our bore drilled, we proceeded to get electricity connection. This was another messy process. To get a 3-phase connection so we can run our pump, we need to apply for electricity connection. Since there is no transformer near by, they cannot give us the connection directly. It seems unless there are at least 2 connection requests from a location, the electricity department will not setup a new transformer. The alternative is for us to bear all the costs of setting a new transformer and the cost of all the poles and wiring up to the transformer. The cost comes to around Rs. 2-3 lakhs.

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  • Drilling A Bore In the Farm

    Soon after registering our farm land, the first thing we wanted to do was to get a bore drilled. Remember that our land did not have anything. No bore, no electricity, no fence, nothing. It is just barren land. Supposedly, the previous owner used to grow corn using the rain fed method a few years ago. Basically they would sow corn just before rains and the only way the crop would be watered is from rains. Since we wanted to grow a vegetable and fruit forest which needs water year round, we decided to get a bore drilled and setup a sprinkler or drip irrigation system to water our plants and trees. So the first step was to dig a bore.

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  • Loan On Farm

    If you remember, the previous owner of our farm had a loan on the farm. They obtained the loan from a cooperative bank. At the time of registration, the agreement between us was that they will clear the loan once they receive money from us on the registration date. Once they repay the bank loan, the bank is supposed to report it to the Tahsildar office and the loan record is supposed to be cleared from our land documents. But it was easier said than done. Before receiving money, everyone agrees to all kinds of conditions. Once the money changes hands, we have to run behind them to get the things to which they agreed to do so willingly and cheerfully.

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  • 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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  • Budget 2024 And How It Affects Me

    Budget 2024 announcements concluded and like every year I have to check if it affects me. This budget was a major headache for my calculations. It doesn’t affect how I invest but making the tax calculations will take a lot of time. There were some bad surprises but that is how budget works. You just have to work with it. For one, the short term capital gains tax was increased from 15% to 20%. Indexation benefits have been removed. A big blow for real estate and long term debt mutual funds (in certain cases). There was some good news in the way of changing tax slabs for new regime and increasing standard deductions, but neither of them apply to me.

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