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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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Is It The End Of 4% Rule Then?
I have written so many articles on 4% rule, that it feels like I can make a living by just writing about it. Yet we keep coming back to it because times have changed, or may be the 4% rule does not work in Indian context or because it may not work during recession and what not. The latest in this saga is this article I read a few days ago. Without going into too many details, the article suggests that a new research found that the 4% spending rule may be too high and we should probably go for a 1.9% rule instead. That sucks. I made my whole early retirement planning based on the 4% rule and it seems like I may be doomed.
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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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Truth About My Weight Loss
In the past few weeks, I met a bunch of friends after a long time. We had a sort of mini reunion of my 10th class friends and a mini reunion of my engineering friends. After having met all these folks, one theme that came out in common with some of them was that I lost weight. While it was true that I lost weight, I did not care to explain why to any of them, primarily because it can’t be explained in a single sentence. My weight loss is not related to any health issue but is related to adapting to goals. Just like in finance, goals related to health also need adaptation so as to give yourself the best chance to succeed. In the short term it may feel like you are taking a loss, but in the long term, you are actually making inroads to be successful. You should have the propensity to take short term pain to make long term gains. What has all this to do with my weight loss you ask? Read on to learn more.
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It Is All In The Mindset
Early retirement is not for everyone and I have written an article a long time ago about it. It is completely normal if you don’t want to retire early or even ever. Some enjoy working for many reasons, which I may not understand, just the way some don’t understand why anyone should retire early. And then there are some who are in between. Again there are many reasons for them to not be able to jump ship and join the early retirement bandwagon. Some reasons are very legit like not having big enough salary or having too many dependents and thus expenses, or family not in agreement etc. Then there is a minority who in spite of having enough are unable to retire early.
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Inflation Is Hurting The Stock Market
Inflation is always bad news. This is nothing new anymore now is it? I have already written several posts about inflation in the recent past. Generally it affects your expenses, but when central banks decide to fix it, your investments also take a hit. Take the case of FED and US stock market. First the FED printed way too much money and the government handed free checks to everyone during COVID-19. At the time it seemed like a good idea. Later, when the FED wanted to stop printing, it could not because, well, socialist activities are hard to discontinue. Moreover the stock market would get spooked every time they even mentioned quantitative tightening, let alone interest rate hikes.
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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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