Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 9


  • Year In Review – 2021 Net Worth

    It has been a while but I just realized that I did not do my net worth analysis as part of my year in review series. So here we go. I am doing the net worth calculations using the very basic formula for net-worth which is basically assets - 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 over the years. My retirement is in no way dependent on my net worth. It is only dependant on my corpus of investments (debt MFs and equity MFs). Real estate is not an investment since I live in it.

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  • Sensors Tell A Story

    After having set up my solar panel, I installed a bunch of voltage and current sensors in various places to collect data about my power usage and also to keep track of how much solar energy is being generated. The plan was to optimize and maximize solar power usage. I want to eke out every bit of power from the panel and optimize the hell out of solar energy. I also wanted to build some visual artifacts (graphs) out of the data. If you are like me, crazy about data, and data analysis, then this post is for you.

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  • The Cost Of Hiring Me

    You know, I was wondering, why do I charge for some things and why I don’t charge anything for some other things? I thought I should clarify it for myself and for the benefit of others. So there are a few ways people look at income. Those who are not yet financially independent are offering their time and skills to earn money. The more time and skill they have, the more they earn. Of course there is a huge hand of luck involved because one could be very well skilled and may be putting a lot of time as well, but they may not be earning as much. Most start-ups are started by brilliant people but 90% of them don’t succeed because you know – luck, right time, right place, yada yada.

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  • Year In Review - 2021 Returns

    Continuing on in the year in review series, I now take a look at my returns in 2021. 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 had a real crazy bull run. Those kind of dream runs rarely happen, so congratulations on living through one of them :). It does not matter which index you look at, all of them were in the green. So lets start by comparing my portfolio returns with some of those indices.

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  • Year In Review - 2021 Annual Expenses

    In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. So in this post I will be covering my annual expenses in 2021. 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 laptop etc. Once I go over the expenses I will explain why we spent where and then we will move on to the budget for this year. Every year after retirement has been different with an interesting set of expenses that were never seen in the previous year. Last year wasn’t different either.

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  • Year In Review - 2021 Monthly Expenses

    By now 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 2021 and the budget for 2022.

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  • Year In Review 2021

    Every new year I reflect on the last year and write about some of the highlights and low-lights. Continuing that tradition, this post is all about what interesting things have happened in my life in the year gone by. When the year 2021 began, I was hopeful and optimistic because year 2020 has been a particularly bad year on many fronts especially the impact of COVID-19. Unfortunately 2021 was even worse. We saw the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020 and I thought that was bad enough. But in 2021, India was hit by the second wave with a much graver consequences not just in India but all over the world. And yet, here we are looking eye-to-eye at a possible third wave that may hit us even worse.

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  • How Much Did Franklin Ultra Short Term Fund Return

    It has been more than a year and a half since Franklin Templeton India sent out that email letting investors know that it is winding up six debt mutual funds. There was a lot of uncertainty at the time and many people were worried that they might lose their investments. Nothing of that sort has happened and we got back most of it. There is still some more to come, but at least people are confident that they will get back their full investment. That is also the reason that we don’t hear much in the news about Franklin anymore. Back in the day you would hear about it pretty much every other week.

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  • Laptop Price Inflation

    Last time I did a review of my electricity bill inflation. Conveniently I was tracking the utility bills since 2012 so I had enough data. That got me thinking. May be I can find other expenses for which I have long enough data to calculate inflation. Remember, inflation is different for different products. For example, your food inflation will be different from your medical bill inflation, or electricity bill inflation etc. So you will need to find the inflation for each category of expenses. Since I recently purchased a laptop, I thought if I can dig up some old bills, may be I can calculate my laptop expenses inflation. Which is exactly what this post is all about.

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  • Acer Aspire 7 Review

    As you already know, I recently purchased a budget gaming laptop – Acer Aspire 7 with Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics card. I really did not need a gaming laptop because I barely play games anymore. But the deal was so good compared to a similarly spec’ed laptop without the graphics card, that I could not pass up the deal. It’s been only 10 days since I have the laptop under my possession, but that does not deter me from writing a review. If you are also looking to buy this laptop, this post might help you in making a decision. If you are not planing to buy one and are still reading, you might be here to pass some time. Either way have fun.

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