Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 8
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Tools I Use In Electronics Projects
A reader asked to me to write a post on the tools I use in my projects. Since my projects range from software to electronics to mechanical, the number of tools I use becomes quite large. So in this post I will cover the tools I routinely use in electronic projects. May be in another post I might cover the tools I use for more mechanical projects such as repairing cycles or scooter, setting up solar panels and batteries, building rain water harvesting pipes, plumbing, drip irrigation etc. If anyone is interested, I might also write a post on the tools I use in software development but in this case the tools vary quite a bit depending on the software. Anyway, lets get straight to the point and do a bit of show and tell of the tools I use in my electronic projects.
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Professional Service vs DIY
Is it better to take the help of professional services or do things yourself? I don’t know myself, but I have become more of a DIY (do it yourself) person ever since I retired. There is a certain fun element in doing things with your own hands even if you do a pretty poor job. However, earlier I was a person who got most things done by profession service personnel. What has changed then? Well, the time, that’s what has changed. When I was still working, there was barely any free time. It was easier, more efficient and less expensive to have someone fix things rather than me wasting my time. Remember, if you consider my hourly rate, it was way higher than the hourly rate for the services (at least in India). Now, I have a lot of free time and my hourly rate is precisely zero.
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Repaired My TV
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I tried to repair a TV but my first attempt failed. After some more work I was finally able to fix it! At least some positive news after a lot of set backs in repairs, about which I will write in another post. If you have not read my previous post, I urge you to read that first. Basically what happened was that my old LCD TV back from 2006, started to show its age and conked out, not quite spectacularly though. My initial investigation led me to believe that the culprit could be 3 capacitors (caps) on the power board. However, when I ordered the replacement parts and soldered them, the TV was still not turning on, or is turning on briefly before freezing.
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How Not To Repair A Phone
The last few months have been quite busy for me. I was so busy that I could not allocate any time to write new posts on my blog. Multiple things were happening which were more exciting and interesting. In between I had a bad shoulder injury which put me completely out of commission for a good one month. It has been more than 2 months and I am still recovering. Meanwhile other events demanded my attention so the frequency of my posts have gone down from two per week to just one. If things ever normalize I will go back to my previous cadence. While there were a bunch of interesting events that took place, here are a couple of them related to mobile phones.
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Failed To Repair My TV
The past few weeks have been quite busy with multiple electronics failures and other interesting things happening in my personal life. One of the failed electronics was my old TV. This was the first TV that I bought with my salary a few months after I landed my first job. So it has some emotional connection. To get you up to speed, I finished my MS in the US and also started working in the US. In 2006 when I bought the TV, flat screen TVs were just coming into the market. I wanted to test out the latest in tech but did not want to spend too much on it. So I bought a cheap Sceptre X32GV-Komodo flat screen TV. It worked great. So great in fact that I shipped it to India when I moved in 2011.
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Experience With New Income Tax Portal
The new income tax portal launched last year, so it is not really “new” anymore, but I wanted to write about my experience with it. When it first launched, there were innumerable bugs. The portal was very slow. Login used to fail due to excessive load on the servers. Data I entered would not tally properly because of rounding errors in the software etc. But it has come a long way. The most recent tax submission process was much better compared to how much I struggled last year. Perhaps there are still bugs but I did not encounter any this time around, or at least I figured out the quirks in the system and worked around them.
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This Blog Is 4 Years Old
Yes, it has been that long! While I became financially independent on December 31, 2017, I officially retired on June 29, 2018 and started writing this blog almost one month later on July 21, 2018. It was a long journey, for me at least, since I started and quit twice earlier (separate unrelated blogs). May be third time’s the charm? Since this post is mostly bragging about myself and how much I wrote, you can safely skip it. For the rest, you get to see some silly insights into the number of active users and how much I am earning with ads on the blog (got your attention now didn’t I?).
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How Is 4% Rule Working Out For Me?
I ended the previous post with a resounding “yes” for the question on whether 4% rule works in India or not. I also mentioned that given what we know about current inflation and return expectations in India, we can assume that the investment will last about 50 years assuming a conservative 30% asset allocation. In this article I want to show you how my portfolio was performing because I retired based on 4% rule with a bit of a buffer. So how is that working out for me? Given the market correction in the past few months and the increasing inflation, am I draining more money than I expected and am I at risk of out living my corpus? Lets find out.
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Should I Buy A Low Speed Electric Scooter?
Hopefully this is the last post in the series of articles I have been writing on my quest for switching over to electric vehicle from a gasoline one. In the last post, I did a cost analysis of petrol vs electric scooter and with those calculations it did not make a lot of sense to buy an electric scooter. So the next thing I wanted to research was a cheaper low speed electric scooter. The one I was looking to research was Hero Electric Optima CX. It has a claimed range of 80 KMs and a top speed of 45 kmph. That speed may be reasonable for local driving which is pretty much what we use our gasoline scooter for.
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Gasoline vs Electric Scooter Ownership Cost
If you have been following my last few posts, you might know that I have established that an electric car is probably not the right choice for us. First, it is not cost effective because we drive so little and the cost of ownership is cheaper with gasoline car if we drive anything less than 10,000 KMs/year. Second, during the odd times that we have to travel on long trips, an electric car fails to meet our requirements because of lack of proper infrastructure as of now. The alternative is to keep our old gasoline car and instead swap out our gasoline scooter with an electric one. Now, does it make financial sense to do it? Lets find out.
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