• Failed To Repair My TV

    The past few weeks have been quite busy with multiple electronics failures and other interesting things happening in my personal life. One of the failed electronics was my old TV. This was the first TV that I bought with my salary a few months after I landed my first job. So it has some emotional connection. To get you up to speed, I finished my MS in the US and also started working in the US. In 2006 when I bought the TV, flat screen TVs were just coming into the market. I wanted to test out the latest in tech but did not want to spend too much on it. So I bought a cheap Sceptre X32GV-Komodo flat screen TV. It worked great. So great in fact that I shipped it to India when I moved in 2011.

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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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  • Retiring Early During A Recession

    A reader asks “Can you write a post on how early retirement works in a bear market (potential recession) scenario going for say 1-2 more years earning less than 10% or even say 6%. Meaning a real return of 0% as per your assumption. What kind of planning should folks who have already retired and folks who are planning can take. Keeping a good buffer is definitely one option but any other thoughts to discuss there (fixed income vs equity balance or others) will be great to see”. So lets see what it takes to be retired in this situation and if there is something we can do to reduce the impact of an unexpected long recessionary climate.

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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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  • 4% Rule In Indian Context

    I have already written a few posts on 4% rule, but some readers were not sure if it really works in Indian context. We don’t have the equivalent of the Trinity study (which resulted in the 4% rule) done here in India. Or at least I am not aware of one. For those of you who don’t know the Trinity study, I will brief you on it. Basically the study found that if you withdraw 4% from your retirement account every year after accounting for inflation your retirement fund should last 30 years or more. But the study was done in the US using bond, inflation and equity market data from 1925 to 1995. It is really not a rule as much as a thumb rule. While I don’t have the luxury of such nice data for India, in this post, I will attempt to use some crude data loosely based on the same notion.

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  • Correction, Bear or Recession?

    We are going through some exciting times in equity market. It has been dropping for the past few weeks and media has opened up the discussion of possible recession. I say, we are no where near recession yet. I might agree to the fact that this is near the start of a bear market. Any drop in the market you have been experiencing in the past few weeks or even months is just a correction at best. Of course there are no proper definitions for each of the terms – correction, bear and recession, but there are some generally accepted ones. So we just need to check the definitions and see where we are in the market cycle.

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  • My Thoughts On Early Retirement

    This is a continuation of my previous post regarding email conversations I had with a reader of my blog. The reader wanted to know if they can retire early given that they have already achieved financial independence. I am republishing our conversation in the hopes that it will help some of you. It is not about my replies which are probably not as useful, but more about the reader’s dilemma and may be others have better advice which you can leave in the comments below. So without much ado, here is the conversation with some information redacted to protect the privacy of the reader.

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  • Should I Retire Early?

    As you probably know, I sometimes get emails from the readers of my blog asking for advice or giving me suggestions. I find some of the emails to be interesting and intriguing and would like to publish my conversation with them as an article in the hopes that it might help others who are in similar situations. In the past I have posted one such article about a reader’s dilemma. A few days ago, another reader reached out to me asking for some advice. Now I don’t know how useful my advice is, but I give them anyway :). I just hope it helps them. I thought our conversation was interesting and wanted to post it so if others have any advice they too could suggest something in the comments. So with the person’s permission I am reproducing most of our email conversation redacting some information to respect their privacy.

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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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