Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 9
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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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My Case Against Electric Cars
In a previous post I mentioned how it did not make financial sense to buy an EV for my use case even with all the government incentives. In this article I will explain what other factors affected my decision to buy an electric car. Before I begin, I want to mention that like most things in life, some decisions are very subjective and personal. Take the case of home ownership. Some prefer to own a house and settle in one place. Others prefer the flexibility of moving around and not having to worry about repairs and general maintenance of the house. We all know which makes more financial sense, still we might prefer one over the other purely because of our personal taste.
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Gasoline vs Electric Car Ownership Cost
The car that we currently own was manufactured in 2007 which we purchased in 2011 as an used car. It is now almost 15 years old. The time has come for re-registration. So I was wondering if I should go for the fitness test and get it renewed for another 5 years or if I should simply sell or exchange for a new car. Seeing how there is a lot of excitement in the electric car arena, I was wondering if I should go for it. Although battery EVs are sold on the premise that they save environment I don’t really buy that. No one really knows how much pollution is generated to build the car batteries. Excavating all the rare minerals, transporting and manufacturing of the batteries might cause a lot of pollution. It may not be CO2, it could be some other pollution we just don’t know yet and they still could be as harmful or more harmful than the green house gases. And lets not forget the human rights violation and child labor involved in excavating some of the rare minerals.
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The Time I Wished I Was Working
In the 4 odd years since I retired, I never felt like I was missing out on my salary, except for during this period. The stock markets are falling and RBI has started hiking interest rates. Which means that NAV of both debt mutual funds and equity mutual funds are falling. That only means one thing – invest more! Unfortunately since I don’t get salary or any other income anymore, I have to sell some mutual funds and buy another. Normally I do this by selling the mutual funds that are gaining and buying the mutual funds that are falling. Here I am not talking about individual funds. I am talking about the type or category of mutual funds.
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How Is Your Portfolio Doing?
When ever the market falls, people are curious about my portfolio. They want to know how my portfolio is handling the crash (according to them). I shrug my shoulders and reply “same old”. Yes, that is pretty much my attitude whether the market is going up or down or under. The portfolio is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Actually, to tell you the truth, the market is certainly not crashing. It is just a correction, at least so far. May be if it falls a lot more from here, I may call it a crash.
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TV Inflation
It is the season of inflation. Lately we have been hearing a lot about inflation and I have been writing a lot about it too. Still if you thought that wasn’t enough, here is one more for you :). Normally I don’t calculate inflation of anything unless I have at least 10 years worth of data. As I look back, I have as much data on my TVs, so why not calculate the inflation of a TV? Remember that inflation should be looked at holistically. Knowing inflation of one device like TV or laptop does not really makes sense, but all these inflations add up to your final inflation number. It is just a fun exercise and lets keep it that way.
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