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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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Gasoline vs Electric Scooter Ownership Cost
If you have been following my last few posts, you might know that I have established that an electric car is probably not the right choice for us. First, it is not cost effective because we drive so little and the cost of ownership is cheaper with gasoline car if we drive anything less than 10,000 KMs/year. Second, during the odd times that we have to travel on long trips, an electric car fails to meet our requirements because of lack of proper infrastructure as of now. The alternative is to keep our old gasoline car and instead swap out our gasoline scooter with an electric one. Now, does it make financial sense to do it? Lets find out.
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My Case Against Electric Cars
In a previous post I mentioned how it did not make financial sense to buy an EV for my use case even with all the government incentives. In this article I will explain what other factors affected my decision to buy an electric car. Before I begin, I want to mention that like most things in life, some decisions are very subjective and personal. Take the case of home ownership. Some prefer to own a house and settle in one place. Others prefer the flexibility of moving around and not having to worry about repairs and general maintenance of the house. We all know which makes more financial sense, still we might prefer one over the other purely because of our personal taste.
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Gasoline vs Electric Car Ownership Cost
The car that we currently own was manufactured in 2007 which we purchased in 2011 as an used car. It is now almost 15 years old. The time has come for re-registration. So I was wondering if I should go for the fitness test and get it renewed for another 5 years or if I should simply sell or exchange for a new car. Seeing how there is a lot of excitement in the electric car arena, I was wondering if I should go for it. Although battery EVs are sold on the premise that they save environment I don’t really buy that. No one really knows how much pollution is generated to build the car batteries. Excavating all the rare minerals, transporting and manufacturing of the batteries might cause a lot of pollution. It may not be CO2, it could be some other pollution we just don’t know yet and they still could be as harmful or more harmful than the green house gases. And lets not forget the human rights violation and child labor involved in excavating some of the rare minerals.
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DIY Newton's Cradle
It has been a while since I wrote anything about the projects I do with my daughter. Actually we haven’t built anything in a long time. I was doing some small cardboard projects but nothing to write home about. However, recently we built a newton’s cradle just for fun and I thought it might be an interesting project to blog about. I think my daughter came across Newton’s cradle somehow in one of her videos and she was explaining to me about this toy where balls would swing like a pendulum. I immediately understood what she was trying to explain and decided to built it.
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Have A Checklist
Whenever I notice that I need to do something routinely which has a bunch of steps based on certain conditions, I turn to creating a checklist. Having a checklist helps me immensely. If you follow a checklist you can avoid mistakes and complete the work quickly. Take for instance doing taxes. If I did not have a checklist, I am certain to miss something or the other and then will have to file a revised tax form. Of course when there are new entries in the tax form, or if your incomes have changed, I update the checklist. I have similar checklists for making backups of my media (photos, music, movies etc), laptop (code, libraries etc) and even for investing.
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Momentum Or Contrarian?
There are many investment styles, but I am generally in conflict with momentum investing vs contrarian investing. Sometimes I feel like I should be following the momentum style of investing. And most other times I feel like I should be a contrarian investor. If you don’t know those two different styles of investing, don’t worry I will give an explanation. Sometimes momentum strategy works better and at other times a contrarian style works better. Knowing which will work better at any given time is all together another difficult task. I am not really sure which one works best in the long term though.
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