Posts in category "year-in-review"
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Year In Review - 2025 Monthly Expenses
The monthly expenses for the year 2025 were inline with the budget. Nothing much to write, but here are some details for those who are interested. It has been 8 years since I started tracking monthly expenses and that is a long enough time to make sense of any inflation we have been facing. Let’s get right to it.
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CamillaDSP in CoreELEC
I have a 5.1 surround system and that was good enough for my needs. But there is one problem that has been bothering me for a while and that is the room’s frequency response. I don’t have a dedicated home theater room. The TV and surround sound is in my living room with a lot of open spaces. The floor, walls and ceiling are all very reflective surfaces. Which means the audio experience is not the greatest.
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Eight Years In Financial Independence
Happy new year 2026 everyone. It is now more than 8 years since we became financially independent! Can’t believe how time flies. At the end of December 2017, I was super excited that we are finally reaching our goal of financial independence according to my calculations at that time. Now it is already 8 years past that milestone. These last few years have been as liberating and peaceful as I had hoped for.
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Year In Review - 2024 Returns
The last update in the year in review series is on my returns in 2024. In the short run, the returns might seem high or low, but in the long run it should match my expectation of 10%. That was the assumption I used when I decided to retire early. As long as I can keep my expenses inflation to around 6% and my returns to around 10%, I should be able to manage to live a decent retired life. Since it has only been about 7 years since my financial independence, there isn’t a lot of data to go with. My long term inflation is currently slightly less than 4%, so that is all good. What about my returns? Are they at least 10%?
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Year In Review - 2024 Annual Expenses
In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. This is the continuation of that post and I will be covering my annual expenses in 2024. 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 car etc. I will explain where we are spending the most and why. Remember that for all the expenses, whether monthly or annual, the money is coming out of my retirement corpus which consists of a bunch of debt and equity mutual funds. There are no other incomes or special savings for annual expenses.
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Year In Review - 2024 Monthly Expenses
Another year and another review of our monthly expenses. Time to check where we have spent the most in 2024 and see if we are with in the budget. I will also be going over our inflation numbers starting from my financial independence till date, which is a good 7 years. At the end of the post I will prepare a new budget of monthly expenses for the year 2025. Let’s get started.
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Year In Review 2024
A very happy new year to all my readers. Another year has passed and it is time for the usual year in review to bring out some highlights and low lights from our life in the past year. Time to reflect and assess how things went. The past year was good in some ways and not so good in other ways. I think it is pretty much how most years are anyway :). Don’t think a year can be all good or all bad.
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Year In Review - 2023 Returns
The last update in the year in review series is on my returns in 2023. In the short run, the returns might seem high or low, but in the long run it should match my expectation of 10%. That was the assumption I used when I decided to retire early. As long as I can keep my expenses inflation to around 6% and my returns to around 10%, I should be able to manage to live a decent retired life. Since it has only been about six years since my financial independence, there isn’t a lot of data to go with. But as you saw from my update on expenses, we have managed to keep our inflation to below 6%. Now the question is, were we able to keep our returns to above 10%? Lets find out.
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Year In Review - 2023 Annual Expenses
In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. This is the continuation of that post and I will be covering my annual expenses in 2023. 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 car etc. I will explain where we are spending the most and why. Remember that for all the expenses, whether monthly or annual, the money is coming out of my retirement corpus which consists of a bunch of debt and equity mutual funds. There are no other incomes or special savings for annual expenses. Last year’s annual expenses were low because thankfully we did not have any big ticket item like buying a car.
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Year In Review - 2023 Monthly Expenses
It is about time I reviewed my monthly expenses for the past year. I do this activity at the start of every year. There are two kinds of expenses I track. One is monthly expenses which sort of appear most months like food expenses, internet etc. Then there are those expenses that occur once a year or once every few years. Those are considered as annual expenses. In today’s post I will go over the monthly expenses of last year and how it compares with the budget I made at the start of 2023. Lets also look at inflation since my retirement. Later in the post I will inflate my monthly expenses and set a budget for 2024. Lets dig in then.
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