Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 8
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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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How To Prepare For A Hard Disk Failure
In April 2021, my 8TB media center hard disk suddenly stopped working. It started to make the “click of death” sounds while we were watching some movie and my heart sank. I knew this could be the end of life for the drive. I turned off the media center PC and turned it on but it was unable to discover the HDD. Bad luck struck. At least I am prepared for such kind of an event, so it was not too bad. The drive contains all my important files, photos, videos, music and movies. I purchased the drive in November 2016, so it lasted a good four and a half years. Not bad for a drive that has been running almost 24/7.
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Failed To Repair An Android Tablet
I tried to fix an old android tablet and I failed. If you recall, a few posts ago, I mentioned how I failed to repair my TV. Later I figured out the issue and eventually was able to fix it. I hope the same can happen with the tablet. But as of now, after many attempts to recover it, I was unable to bring it back to life. It was working fine until the battery has gone bad and the device would not turn on without a battery. A few weeks ago, the battery of this cheap android tablet bulged like a balloon. The bulge was so big that the back of the device opened up. In the past, when some of my old android phones had a bulged battery, I could remove the battery and still run it using a USB charger. That does not seem to work with tablets though.
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Time To Revisit My Expectations?
Most of my finance related numbers for retirement were based on an inflation of 6% and investment returns of 10%. Going by the recent data, neither inflation nor returns are inline with my expectations. We are in a high inflation and low returns period of a market cycle. The worst part is that the returns from both equity and debt are low at the same time. While it is not as bad in India, elsewhere in the world, that is causing a lot of pain. Since the rest of the world will affect India at some point, I thought it was time to revisit my numbers and see if they still make sense in the future as I continue my long retirement journey.
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How I Waste My Time
You know, in a typical year after retirement, I noticed that I have been working on some repair or pet project at the rate of 1 or 2 per month. I don’t like to explain all of them, otherwise this blog will be just that – my repair/project blog. But once in a while I feel like I should write about these small projects. Otherwise many keep wondering what I do after retirement and how I am able to spend time. Generally I just tell these folks that I am busy with my family especially my daughter since she does not attend school (unschooled). After hearing this, most stop asking any more questions. It is not that I am working on any top secret projects. Just that these small project don’t qualify as something to write or talk about them.
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Android Tablet As A Second Monitor
In one for my earlier posts I mentioned about using an android tablet as a second monitor for my laptop. I wanted to explain how I did that in case anyone is interested, although I am not sure how useful it will be. First of all, let me explain my setup. I almost always use Linux and my current favorite distro is Manjaro. I dual boot to Windows 11 for the occasional gaming fun. On top of using Manjaro Linux I am on the bleeding edge usually. So instead of using X11 I am actually using Wayland as the display server. If I already lost you, then don’t worry. Continue reading because you may still find something useful in here that works for Windows as well as for Linux with X11.
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Vehicle Inflation
Since I recently purchased a new car, my insurance has shot up quite a bit. I thought this would be a good time to look at my vehicle insurance inflation before the major jump. As I always say, it does not matter what the government published inflation numbers say, the question is how much is your personal inflation. Your corpus, the safe withdrawal rate and thus your financial independence depends on your inflation. So it is always a good idea to know your inflation numbers. In the past, I’ve written a few posts on our inflation of a few things. Here are some of them if you are interested:
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