Posts in category "post-retirement"
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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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How We Arranged Money To Buy Our Farm
After zoning in on the farm that we liked, we decided it was time to take the first step forward, which was to come to an agreement with the owners that we will purchase the farm within a certain duration. The way it is usually done is that we write down an agreement stating we will pay a token amount as advance, and will pay the rest before registration. Usually there will also be a time limit specified in the agreement before which the transaction has to happen. If the transaction is not completed in the stipulated time because the buyer could not arrange the money then the advance is forfeited. If the seller fails to clear their documents they will pay back the advance with interest. The trouble started right from there for us.
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Is The Stock Market Peaking?
I am a little bit concerned. The stock market has been giving great returns for the past 3 years or so. Since the COVID-19 pandemic there has never been a long drawn bear market scenario. How long can this continue? On top of it, I see more and more people getting involved in trading. Some are even quitting their jobs to do trading full time. Generally, when there is euphoria in the market, you see these kind of events happening. New traders, who think they are investors and think they have the know how, enter the stock market just as the market starts peaking. Then, armed with a bunch of algorithms based on back testing, start to do algo trading. When you see more and more of these people, you know the time has come for the market to crash.
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Changes To Solar Controller Setup
A few days ago, we got the exterior of our house painted. I had to move a lot of things out of the way for the painters so they can paint in every nook and corner. During that time I had to disconnect my solar controller electronics setup. What that means is that the solar charge controller takes over the responsibility of deciding when to charge my battery and when to disconnect the grid and let the load run from the battery + solar etc. Unfortunately the way it handles switching between battery, solar and grid is not as optimal as I’d like. Don’t get me wrong, it does a good job, but I always want something better which is why I built my own electronics and software intelligence to go with it to optimize the hell out of the solar panel output.
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Changes To Extraordinary Items Reporting
Recently I made some changes to how I report my extraordinary items. These items could be expenses or income. An extraordinary item is an unusual expense or income that is not accounted for in budget. Generally, I have planned expenses and have a budget for them, but in some rare cases, I had either unexpected income or expense that was not planned. Earlier, I used to consider all extraordinary income as growth in corpus and all extraordinary expenses as growth in expenses. But lately I have changed the reporting. Now, both extraordinary expense and income are considered as growth or drop in corpus. I applied the changes retroactively to all old expenses too. Read on to understand why I made this change.
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Going Wireless With Bluetooth Headset
I have always been a headphones guy. Back when I was working you would almost always find me with my earphones plugged in. It helps me with two things. One, I can drown out all the noise, hubbub and excitement in the office. Not sure why people have to be so social and noisy. And two, it helps me deter people from talking to me because they wouldn’t want to bother a guy deeply in thought with headphones. An introvert thing. Once I retired, I switched from wired headphones to wireless neckbands and it changed a bunch of things for me. That and why I moved to neckbands but not ear buds is coming up next.
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Year In Review - 2023 Returns
The last update in the year in review series is on my returns in 2023. 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 six years since my financial independence, there isn’t a lot of data to go with. But as you saw from my update on expenses, we have managed to keep our inflation to below 6%. Now the question is, were we able to keep our returns to above 10%? Lets find out.
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Year In Review - 2023 Annual Expenses
In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. This is the continuation of that post and I will be covering my annual expenses in 2023. While monthly expenses are those kind of expenses that occur more frequently, yearly expenses occur rarely, perhaps once every few years like house repairs or buying a new car etc. I will explain where we are spending the most and why. Remember that for all the expenses, whether monthly or annual, the money is coming out of my retirement corpus which consists of a bunch of debt and equity mutual funds. There are no other incomes or special savings for annual expenses. Last year’s annual expenses were low because thankfully we did not have any big ticket item like buying a car.
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DC Energy Measurement Using INA226
In an earlier post I wrote about measuring DC energy using PZEM 017. If you recall, I ended the article with a couple of remarks. One was that the device was unable to measure current below 0.02 A. But the bigger problem was that the device could only measure current in one direction. It is uni-directional current sensor. I cannot use this device with my UPS to measure charging and discharging current since I need a bidirectional current sensor in that case. After some searching around I found a few options and one good sensor which is the INA226. So here is a write up of my experience with it. This can get a bit technical, so if you are not into electronics, give this a skip.
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Year In Review - 2023 Monthly Expenses
It is about time I reviewed my monthly expenses for the past year. I do this activity at the start of every year. There are two kinds of expenses I track. One is monthly expenses which sort of appear most months like food expenses, internet etc. Then there are those expenses that occur once a year or once every few years. Those are considered as annual expenses. In today’s post I will go over the monthly expenses of last year and how it compares with the budget I made at the start of 2023. Lets also look at inflation since my retirement. Later in the post I will inflate my monthly expenses and set a budget for 2024. Lets dig in then.
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