Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 10
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What Type Of An Investor Are You?
Sensex is where it was some 7 months ago. We have escalating war on one side and growing inflation on the other side as no nation is immune to the ill effects of loose monetary policy and facing the after effects of stringent COVID restrictions. Sri Lanka is defaulting on its external debt. A nation default on its debt obligation is such a bad news. None of these are good signs and yet the stock market is happily moving forward. What should an investor to do in this situation? The answer may not be quite as exciting as one would think. It is quite boring and you probably already know what I am going to say. Just stay the course, follow your goals, maintain your asset allocation blah blah.
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Property Tax Inflation
It has been slightly over 10 years since we moved to the home we currently reside in. So I thought we should have enough information to calculate the property tax inflation. Why not write a short post about it? In the past I have written a few articles covering inflation of various material goods we posses. This is one more of them. Remember that calculating inflation of individual items like this does not make much sense unless the expense is a major part of your annual expense. For example, if the inflation of the price of a pen is 20% but the price of the pen is Rs. 20, it does not matter how big or small the inflation is, it will not affect your total inflation (for a long time) because Rs. 20 is such a small amount compared to your annual expense. I am calculating inflation just as a fun exercise.
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Gaming Mouse And Mechanical Keyboard
After having purchased a budget gaming laptop I was tempted to buy a gaming mouse. I know that it was one of the stupidest ideas because I am not even that good at gaming. I am someone you would call as a casual gamer, and that too I only play RTS (real time strategy) games anymore. At least, in the past, I used to play FPS (first person shooter) games which require precise mouse movements. So really there is no need for a gaming mouse for me. This desire for material goods is precisely what I advice everyone to avoid but here I am doing the same mistake. It is one more of those “do what I say, not what I do” sort of things.
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Solar Panel Output Under Various Conditions
In a previous post I talked about how my sensors tell a story regarding our power usage. There are still many more stories that the sensors can tell us about how we use electricity and how much solar power is being generated. Have you ever wondered how the solar power output looks like during the course of a day? Let me give you a hint – it almost looks like a half-rectified sine wave. It was a really interesting discovery. How about the output of solar panel when the day is cloudy? I have answers to all these questions and more in this post.But first let me walk you through the whole setup that I have at home.
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Should You Be Worried About Inflation
For the past few months we have been hearing about the increasing inflation in the US. Is it possible that the same could happen in India and should we be worried? First lets try to understand the severity of inflation in the US. The inflation number in the US used to hover around 2% for the longest time. But it has shot up to as high as 7.9% in February 2022. That is almost 4 times as high as the average! That does hurt. It is a number not seen in 40 years! In India, the inflation is still not that high, so we don’t have to worry as much as our friends over on the other side of the world. Still, it is always useful to do a thought experiment and see if it is a topic of concern.
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Why I Don't Have New Year Goals Anymore
I am the kind of person who really enjoys setting up goals and trying to achieve them. So every year before the start of a new year, I have a couple of goals that I’d like to achieve that year. Usually one goal is about health and fitness and another goal can be anything. This has been the case since 2008. But lately, I have stopped making new year goals. Now my goals are not aligned with the years any more. I just make a goal when I feel like and have an approximate target date and try to execute as best as I can.
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Year In Review – 2021 Net Worth
It has been a while but I just realized that I did not do my net worth analysis as part of my year in review series. So here we go. I am doing the net worth calculations using the very basic formula for net-worth which is basically
...continue readingassets - liabilities. Some don’t agree with that formula, but I will continue to use it since that is what I have used in the past. If I change the formula now, then there will be discontinuity in the numbers. Moreover, since I don’t publish any numbers, it does not matter what my net worth really is. It is only to show how it has grown over the years. My retirement is in no way dependent on my net worth. It is only dependant on my corpus of investments (debt MFs and equity MFs). Real estate is not an investment since I live in it. -
Sensors Tell A Story
After having set up my solar panel, I installed a bunch of voltage and current sensors in various places to collect data about my power usage and also to keep track of how much solar energy is being generated. The plan was to optimize and maximize solar power usage. I want to eke out every bit of power from the panel and optimize the hell out of solar energy. I also wanted to build some visual artifacts (graphs) out of the data. If you are like me, crazy about data, and data analysis, then this post is for you.
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The Cost Of Hiring Me
You know, I was wondering, why do I charge for some things and why I don’t charge anything for some other things? I thought I should clarify it for myself and for the benefit of others. So there are a few ways people look at income. Those who are not yet financially independent are offering their time and skills to earn money. The more time and skill they have, the more they earn. Of course there is a huge hand of luck involved because one could be very well skilled and may be putting a lot of time as well, but they may not be earning as much. Most start-ups are started by brilliant people but 90% of them don’t succeed because you know – luck, right time, right place, yada yada.
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Year In Review - 2021 Returns
Continuing on in the year in review series, I now take a look at my returns in 2021. Although this is not really important since investments are for long term and there is no point looking at returns every year, I like to review it nonetheless. Last year the stock market had a real crazy bull run. Those kind of dream runs rarely happen, so congratulations on living through one of them :). It does not matter which index you look at, all of them were in the green. So lets start by comparing my portfolio returns with some of those indices.
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