Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 6
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Solar Panel Project Update - Part 1
It has been a while since I gave any updates on my solar panel project so I thought I should write a post on it. This can get pretty technical so if you are not into electronics or software, you can skip. Since I last reported about my design I’ve made a few changes mainly to increase the stability of the system. What happened was that in the long run, I found some problems that rear their head sometimes intermittently. As a result I had to change the design to recover some components from their weird state. In addition I reduced the variability of readings by the sensors.
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Year In Review – 2022 Net Worth
The last post in the year in review series for the year is on my net worth. 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 or fallen over the years. My retirement is in no way dependent on my net worth. It is only dependent on my corpus of investments (debt MFs and equity MFs). -
Budget 2023 And How It Affects Me
Every year after the union budget I publish a post on how it affects me. I am doing the same again now. Usually the budget does not affect my financial planning much except for that one time when the finance minister introduced the tax on long term capital gains on equities. This budget was pretty mild and simple. No nasty surprises (at least for me). The only announcements that needed any financial planing were –
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Year In Review - 2022 Returns
Continuing on in the year in review series, I now take a look at my returns in 2022. 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 contrary to its general nature, did nothing interesting really. It was mostly flat with the market touching the peak around January and went down to the lows in June and back up by December. In the end, most of the indices that I track have ended slightly higher than where they started the year. My corpus performed inline with the indices, nothing too high or low. Enough talking lets start by comparing my portfolio returns with some of those indices.
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Year In Review - 2022 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 2022. 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. Every year since retirement we have seen different kinds of expenses and last year wasn’t any different either.
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Year In Review - 2022 Monthly Expenses
You already know about the two kinds of expenses that I track – monthly and annual expenses. You probably also know that I publish my expense report for the past year and mull over it a bit. Then I create a new budget for the expenses for current year. Following the tradition, here is a post about my monthly expenses in 2022 and the budget for 2023.
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Year In Review 2022
Happy new year to the readers of my blog. I know that statement becomes stale quite quickly. Like every year, I reflect upon the events that happened over the last year and write a short summary of how things went and where I can improve for this year. Of course, every year is different with new challenges and events, so the learnings don’t always easily translate to the new one, but we should at least try :). Compared to 2021, the previous year was considerably better. There were no more crazy COVID-19 waves and people’s movement and businesses footfalls have gone back to their pre-covid levels. That is the good news in general at a global level. The bad news of course is the Russia Ukraine war and the persistently high inflation all over the world. In addition to that, I have my own highlights and lowlights at a personal level. Let me unwrap them quickly for you.
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Internet Expenses Inflation
I have covered inflation of so many things in the past. This is one more of them if you haven’t already gotten tired of reading. Inflation causes cost of items to go up over time. Take for example the cost of milk. It was half as expensive some 7 or 8 years ago. But not all things inflate. Some actually reduce in cost as time progresses. Technology for example falls in this space. A 32” TV is cheaper now than it was a couple of years ago because of advances in technology. Internet expenses for a fixed speed falls under this category too. Alternatively, you can think of it in this way – cost of internet remains the same as the speed increases over time.
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Vehicle Maintenance Tools
I thought I was done writing about tools, but there is just one last part I want to cover which are the tools I possess to maintain vehicles. I am pretty sure most of you probably already have all of them, but just in case there is a new vehicle owner, it might help. Like always, I wish I had more tools, but greed is unlimited. So lets start with one of the basic tool that should be in the toolkit which is a tire inflator and tire pressure gauge. The tire inflator that I own, does not have an auto cut-off feature. So I have to manually check the pressure as I am pumping. The auto cut-off pumps were expensive back when I purchased mine, but these days you can get them for cheap and I would happily buy it. I have a tire pressure gauge to quickly check pressure in all tires before I go on a long drive.
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Computer Tools
Hopefully this is the final post on tools I use on a daily basis to fix various things at home. This is about the tools I have in my laptop which helps me be productive in coding. The first and most powerful tool in my arsenal is caffeine :). Just kidding. That used to be my most powerful tool back when I was still considerably young. I was addicted to coffee, Mountain Dew and Red Bull, and there used to be days when I consumed black coffee every 2 hours or so. Now, on to the serious stuff. I don’t think I will be able to do justice listing out all the tools I have because I have way too many and I am sure I will forget one or the other. Anyway, here it goes.
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