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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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Should You Multitask
People say multitasking is a myth and no one can properly execute it. I agree to a certain extent but not fully. There are times when you can effectively multitask. One of them is when doing mundane tasks that do not require active involvement of my brain. For example, boiling milk, mopping floor, watering plants, washing clothes etc are all tasks that don’t need any useful thinking. I try to multitask when doing such boring things. Most of the time, you will see me with ear plugs listening to audio books or podcasts on my phone. I really feel productive doing multitasking in such situations. But should I multitask? Are there any benefits? Or worse yet, any disadvantages?
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Retiring In A Bear Market
I already wrote a bunch of posts about 4% rule on my blog. Most recently I explained how early retirement might work during a prolonged recession. You have also seen how 4% rule is working out for me. Then there is that topic about whether 4% rule actually works in India given the high inflation, which we found out might actually work better in India. But then why should we stop the discussion there? Let us talk about retiring in a bear market. Actually I am not going to do any analysis, but will just point you to an interesting article I read recently.
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How Not To Repair A Phone
The last few months have been quite busy for me. I was so busy that I could not allocate any time to write new posts on my blog. Multiple things were happening which were more exciting and interesting. In between I had a bad shoulder injury which put me completely out of commission for a good one month. It has been more than 2 months and I am still recovering. Meanwhile other events demanded my attention so the frequency of my posts have gone down from two per week to just one. If things ever normalize I will go back to my previous cadence. While there were a bunch of interesting events that took place, here are a couple of them related to mobile phones.
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Franklin Payment Is Now Complete
If you did not already know, I had a bunch of investments in Franklin Ultra Short Term Fund. At one point, I had as much as 50% of my fixed income invested in it. However, my asset allocation being almost 80% in fixed income at that time, my exposure to this specific debt fund was almost 40%. Now imagine how it would feel like to know that Franklin has decided to wind-up the fund? I was not worried that I will lose the money, but the problem is that most of my investments are now illiquid. The whole point of investing in mutual funds was for the liquidity.
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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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