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What Is The Right Asset Allocation
In discussions with various people, the question about asset allocation always comes up. Some want to know what asset allocation they should follow. Others question my asset allocation. Unfortunately, there is no one answer for what asset allocation one should go with. Everyone’s situation is different and their risk appetite is different. They should go wih an asset allocation that they are comfortable with. If they can’t figure it out by themselves, then they should hire a financial planner who can tell them what asset allocation to go with given their situation and mindset. If you push me to give one number, I always say 70% in equity and the rest in fixed income if you plan to retire early, but even otherwise too. In this post I want to go into some nuances.
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Is Managed Farmland A Good Idea?
If you are a regular reader of my blog, you already know that we purchased a farmland a few months ago. I explained how we decided to go with a farm within 2-4 hours from Bangalore in a previous post. As we started our search for a farm, we figured out we could go several different ways. I explain one such method of owning a farm in this post, which is known as managed farmland. We did not go this route in the end but I just want to explain our thought process as we embarked on this journey of doing organic farming.
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The Cost Of Ignorance
Neither mrs. reynd nor myself (especially myself), are good negotiators or bargainers. Not sure how that happened, but I have a hunch as to why that might be the case. I know this weakness very well and hence delegate almost all bargaining to my better half. She is slightly better in this aspect but not by much. We have seen this come up over and over many a times, to our detriment, but we are probably too lazy to correct ourselves. The re-discovery of our skills (or lack there of) came to light just a few days ago when we decided to get our house painted.
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From Unschooling To Schooling
Our daughter is now almost 11 years and she has been unschooled for almost as many years. Well, truth be told, she went to pre-school for almost a year when she was 3 years old, if you can call that school. Since 4, she has never attended school and neither have we actively taught her anything at home – hence unschooled. Some parents teach their kids at home and follow some curriculum and they are labelled as home schoolers. But since about a couple month ago, our daughter is going to school. So from unschooling, straight to school! Yeah, I know that should come as a shock :).
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Changes To Extraordinary Items Reporting
Recently I made some changes to how I report my extraordinary items. These items could be expenses or income. An extraordinary item is an unusual expense or income that is not accounted for in budget. Generally, I have planned expenses and have a budget for them, but in some rare cases, I had either unexpected income or expense that was not planned. Earlier, I used to consider all extraordinary income as growth in corpus and all extraordinary expenses as growth in expenses. But lately I have changed the reporting. Now, both extraordinary expense and income are considered as growth or drop in corpus. I applied the changes retroactively to all old expenses too. Read on to understand why I made this change.
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Going Wireless With Bluetooth Headset
I have always been a headphones guy. Back when I was working you would almost always find me with my earphones plugged in. It helps me with two things. One, I can drown out all the noise, hubbub and excitement in the office. Not sure why people have to be so social and noisy. And two, it helps me deter people from talking to me because they wouldn’t want to bother a guy deeply in thought with headphones. An introvert thing. Once I retired, I switched from wired headphones to wireless neckbands and it changed a bunch of things for me. That and why I moved to neckbands but not ear buds is coming up next.
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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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Time To Take A Decision
In one of the previous posts I explained how we hoped we might buy a farm along with a friend near Thirthahalli. Thanks to COVID-19 we could not execute the plan. Whether that is good or bad we are not sure. But that trip and those discussions got us more interested in starting an organic farm of our own. We were still not clear on many aspects though. Should we go for a place that is close to where we currently live so we can frequently travel to the place and take care of it until we are ready to move. Or should we buy something far away leave it without developing it until we are ready to move. This post is all about how we made that decision.
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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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DC Energy Measurement Using INA226
In an earlier post I wrote about measuring DC energy using PZEM 017. If you recall, I ended the article with a couple of remarks. One was that the device was unable to measure current below 0.02 A. But the bigger problem was that the device could only measure current in one direction. It is uni-directional current sensor. I cannot use this device with my UPS to measure charging and discharging current since I need a bidirectional current sensor in that case. After some searching around I found a few options and one good sensor which is the INA226. So here is a write up of my experience with it. This can get a bit technical, so if you are not into electronics, give this a skip.
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