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Sensors Tell A Story
After having set up my solar panel, I installed a bunch of voltage and current sensors in various places to collect data about my power usage and also to keep track of how much solar energy is being generated. The plan was to optimize and maximize solar power usage. I want to eke out every bit of power from the panel and optimize the hell out of solar energy. I also wanted to build some visual artifacts (graphs) out of the data. If you are like me, crazy about data, and data analysis, then this post is for you.
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A Reader's Dilemma
From time to time I get emails from readers of my blog asking me for some advice or suggestions regarding their situation. Most of them are not unusual and a general advice does suffice. So usually they are not worthy of a blog post. But every once in a while you get some really interesting questions and that’s exactly what happened a few days ago. A reader wrote to me asking for some advice and I responded. Then I felt like it may be useful advice if there are others in a similar situation. Also I wrote a lot about my own thoughts about why I am unschooling my daughter and what the repercussions could be. So I thought I should copy-paste my response here in my blog. With the reader’s permission I am reproducing our conversation with some information redacted.
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Budget 2022 And How It Affects Me
Like last year, here is a quick overview of how the 2022 budget affects me. This is not an analysis or highlights of the budget. I am sure you can find many articles on those topics. This post is more specifically on how the budget affects my financial planning. This year’s budget has absolutely no affect on my financial planning. It is one of the shorter budget speeches. There were a lot of expectations from everyone and I wrote a post on that. Just as predicted, nothing happened. Every year, right before budget there is a lot of noise and anticipation. Budget day comes and goes and everyone is back to their routine :).
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Follow-up to Virtual Meetup #8
Thank you to everyone who joined the virtual meetup #8. Again a very low turn-up but we had some interesting discussions. This is a follow up to that meeting where I paraphrase and summarize what happened in the meet-up. I will not cover all the topics. Just the ones I felt that might help the readers or if I felt that I needed to add more clarity to my responses.
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Vehicle Insurance Craziness
There are many reasons one could think of when choosing a good car, and one of them could be insurance. Being a minimalist, I see car as a thing that takes me from point A to point B safely and protecting me from the elements (I was not like this before becoming a minimalist though). So whether it is raining or too hot, windy or dark, my vehicle should let me go from one place to another, assuming I have sufficient driving skills. For others a car could be a status symbol or it could be a shiny new toy with lots of bells and whistles. Have you heard about the refrigerator and foldable table in your car, or the wipers for your headlights? Well, some features do improve safety, but others are just gimmicks.
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The Cost Of Hiring Me
You know, I was wondering, why do I charge for some things and why I don’t charge anything for some other things? I thought I should clarify it for myself and for the benefit of others. So there are a few ways people look at income. Those who are not yet financially independent are offering their time and skills to earn money. The more time and skill they have, the more they earn. Of course there is a huge hand of luck involved because one could be very well skilled and may be putting a lot of time as well, but they may not be earning as much. Most start-ups are started by brilliant people but 90% of them don’t succeed because you know – luck, right time, right place, yada yada.
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Virtual Meet-up #8
It is time for another virtual meet-up. If you don’t know, I setup these meet-ups roughly once a quarter to meet with my blog readers. It started out as a physical meet-up back in March 2020, but it happened only once thanks to COVID-19. After that we started meeting virtually over Google Meet. So if you are interested, I’d like to invite you to join me in virtual meet-up #8. We discuss random things on the topics of financial planning, early retirement, home schooling, sustainable living or any other topic of interest.
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Year In Review - 2021 Returns
Continuing on in the year in review series, I now take a look at my returns in 2021. Although this is not really important since investments are for long term and there is no point looking at returns every year, I like to review it nonetheless. Last year the stock market had a real crazy bull run. Those kind of dream runs rarely happen, so congratulations on living through one of them :). It does not matter which index you look at, all of them were in the green. So lets start by comparing my portfolio returns with some of those indices.
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Budget 2022 Expectations
As we draw closer to the budget for a financial year, people start to make random predictions about what might come from it. And then there are others who have expectations (wants) from the budget. This is a standard routine every year. It is such an useless exercise, but people and news media always like to do it every year without fail. During such times, I dread to open my news app because there is nothing much other than predictions and wants. No actual news. I wouldn’t do justice if I too did not join the bandwagon and produce crap news. So here is one of them.
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Year In Review - 2021 Annual Expenses
In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. So in this post I will be covering my annual expenses in 2021. 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 laptop etc. Once I go over the expenses I will explain why we spent where and then we will move on to the budget for this year. Every year after retirement has been different with an interesting set of expenses that were never seen in the previous year. Last year wasn’t different either.
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