Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 9
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Our Income Sources In Retirement
While I mentioned my retirement income sources many times before in my blog, I still get questions about that. So I thought I will revisit our income sources after our early retirement in 2018. It has been more than 4 years since we retired and nothing has changed in terms of income sources. I think most people are skeptical when I say I retired early and wonder if I am getting income from multiple sources. Actually that would be a good, probably correct way to retire early. But like many things in my life, I have taken huge risks with very little recourse if things fail. Having a plan B means I don’t have enough trust in Plan A. So plan B really is to make plan A work (you heard that one before didn’t you?). So in this post I will list out all our income sources again.
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How I Funded Purchase Of A New Car
If you have been following my past few posts, you already know that I purchased a new car. You might also recall that the budget I set for the new car was Rs. 6 lakhs. In this post I want to answer some of the questions that might be popping in your mind including why I have a specific budget and how I funded it. I have just one portfolio which is my retirement corpus. I don’t maintain different portfolios for different goals, because I only have one goal which is to stay retired for ever :). The retirement corpus is supposed to fund all expenses in my retirement. It could be any monthly expenses like food, petrol, electricity, kids expenses etc. Or it could be some big annual expenses such as buying a car or painting the house etc. If you want more details, I suggest you follow the links above and read about my expenses first. I explained everything in detail.
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Goodbye Alto, Welcome Ignis
This is the continuation of my previous post on buying a new car. As we established, I decided to buy a new car instead of an used car. The reasons are mentioned in my previous two posts. After having shortlisted a few interesting new cars, I test drove a sample from each manufacturer that I was interested in. In the end, I kept coming back to Maruti cars for one big reason – the engine. Of course, the main reason that only Maruti came out on the top in engine quality and not the other Japanese brands like Honda or Toyota is because I excluded them as they did not fall within my budget. If you didn’t already know, I kept a strict budget of Rs. 6 lakhs for buying a new car. I will get into the reasons as to why only Rs. 6 lakhs in my next post.
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The Hunt For A New Car Begins
If you didn’t already know, it was time for my almost 15 year old Maruti Alto car to be re-registered. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I was contemplating whether to renew the registration or buy a used/new car altogether. From what I gathered, it will cost me some 30-40K on my old car to get it registered for another 5 years. The problem was that I was not sure that it will pass the fitness test even with all the repairs. Moreover, the new registration is valid only for another 5 years. I felt it may be better to sell the car and buy another used or a new car instead of spending the money on it. Then I faced another problem which tipped the scale in favor of buying a new car. First, I could not find a decent used car. Second, I found that it was not easy to sell my old car.
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Bought A New Car
I went against my own advice and decided to buy a new car, although I advice everyone to buy an used car. I am a hypocrite. There, I said it. Not just that, but I don’t even follow another advice I often give to everyone which is that they should go with 70:30 split for their equity and fixed income asset allocation. You already know that I don’t follow that rule. So what is my excuse to buy a new car this time? Continue reading to find out. But before we get started, I want to let you know that this is my first new car. Before this I purchased 3 cars and all of them were used cars. If you include Mrs. re-ynd, that is 5 used cards before buying a new one. So this is something really special for us.
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Tools I Use To Repair Electronics
This is a continuation of my previous post on the tools that I have at my disposal when I am building electornic projects. As I mentioned before, this is not the comprehensive list of tools, but it should give you an idea. In the last post I left off at my soldering station. I use a couple of solder tips depending on the work. If I am soldering thick wires or soldering pins to an arduino nano board, I will use a chisel tip because it spreads heat well and makes good fat solder joint. For delicate work I use a thinner conical tip. Other than that I don’t use any other tips.
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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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