Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 2
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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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Year In Review 2023
I know I am a little bit late for the “year in review” series but I was busy publishing other posts that were in backlog. Finally I got some time to reflect back on the year that has gone by. Every year at the beginning of a new year, I look back at the previous year and pen down some of the highlights and interesting events that transpired. So here goes. Last year was better than 2022 both in terms of finance and personal life. While a new war has started, it has now become a common place for wars to start and then people forgetting about it. Anyway, COVID-19 and the dark shadow it has cast on us is finally really over, although there are still some cases here and there. But those are all global events. Lets talk about what happened in my personal life.
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Dark Theme In Jekyll
Did you notice anything different about the blog? Well, I introduced a dark theme. Can you find how to change the theme by just looking at my blog? No? If you’d like to switch the theme to dark or light mode, read the last section of this post. Now, some of you may know that I migrated my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. Jekyll for those of you who don’t know, is a tool that transforms markdown text into static websites and blogs. If you are left wondering what all that mumbo jumbo was about, then it will perhaps serve you better to skip this post :). For some time now, I have been wanting to add a dark mode for my blog. But it never came up high enough in priority to give it my attention. That changed with the new year. I decided to add dark theme to my blog in 2024.
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Terrace Gardening Update
There are three places where we have been doing organic gardening. One on either sides of the house, two on the terrace and three outside of our compound wall. I already gave an update on the garden on either sides of the house. Since I’d like to keep you guys up to date, in this post I am giving an update on the terrace garden and the garden that is outside. Now for the bad news. We recently stopped doing the terrace gardening. There are a few reasons which I will get to in a minute. Meanwhile, our outside garden is still doing fine, but not to the level we want.
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