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Follow-up to Virtual Meetup #7
Thank you to everyone who joined the virtual meetup #7. We had a very low turn-up but we certainly had a lot of questions. This post is a follow-up to that meeting so you know what we discussed. As it usually happens, the topics we covered varied quite a bit from investment related things to solar panels to taxes.
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Should I Invest in Retail Direct Scheme
The minute I read about RBI launching retail direct scheme to allow retail investors to invest directly in the government bonds, I got excited. I have a huge portion of my investments in G-Sec (government securities) via various mutual funds. If there is a way I can invest directly with RBI, side stepping mutual funds, I could save on some expenses (expense ratio). Sounds good in theory, but will it work? Here are some of my initial thoughts on the scheme as applicable to me.
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How Much Money Did My Solar Panels Save?
It has been more than 6 month since I installed my lone 320W solar panel. So I wanted to check if it was doing me any favors and how much money is it saving. Normally one should wait for a full year to make any kind of useful analysis. But I get easily excited when it comes to doing any kind of data analysis and here I am at it again. It is a very small installation and hence the savings aren’t huge, but at least I am able to verify my predicted numbers (units of electricity) against the real numbers. Did I have any savings or was this whole solar panel project a waste of my time and money. Let’s find out.
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Adding Comments Section To Jekyll
As you know, I have recently migrated from Wordpress to static web hosting using Jekyll. But a couple of things were missing on my blog at that time. One was comments section and the other was a search feature. Since I moved to static web hosting, adding a comments engine was not possible. I did not want to add comments section anyway because there weren’t that many comments to start with and I also did not feel like a lot of interaction is happening anyway. Unfortunately a couple of folks noticed that the comments section was missing and were asking me about it. I thought no one would notice, but I was wrong. So I decided to add it grudgingly.
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What Was My Savings Rate
A lot of times while talking to people about my early retirement, I get to the point of someone wanting to know what percent of my income I was saving. Unfortunately I never tracked that metric. So I wanted to find that out myself which is what this post is all about. The information may not be very accurate but it should be a ballpark figure and has sufficient details in it. The reason for inaccuracy is primarily because I don’t want to track down all my investments and income to the minutest detail. That would take too much time. In fact I don’t even remember my salary information and used my ITR (income tax returns) as a guideline. Then I had to go through my CAMS statement to figure out my investments every year. Hope this helps answer the question about my savings rate.
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Virtual Meet-up #7
I'd like to invite you to join me in a virtual meet-up to discuss random things on the topics of financial planning, early retirement, home schooling or sustainable living. We can share our stories and ask each other questions or give suggestions. As a group we can learn from each other's experience, learnings and pit-falls. Since I post a lot about myself on this blog, you probably already know everything about me. But if you ever wanted to ask me something this is your chance!
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Laptop Price Inflation
Last time I did a review of my electricity bill inflation. Conveniently I was tracking the utility bills since 2012 so I had enough data. That got me thinking. May be I can find other expenses for which I have long enough data to calculate inflation. Remember, inflation is different for different products. For example, your food inflation will be different from your medical bill inflation, or electricity bill inflation etc. So you will need to find the inflation for each category of expenses. Since I recently purchased a laptop, I thought if I can dig up some old bills, may be I can calculate my laptop expenses inflation. Which is exactly what this post is all about.
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What Is Stoicism
When I interact with folks who read my blog, a few of them eventually ask me about Stoicism. It is either to know what Stoicism is or it is about resources related to it so they can also follow Stoicism. The funny thing is that I don’t have any formal training nor did I read any books on the topic. It just so happened that one day I chanced upon some videos on Stoicism and loved the concept. Then I started reading about it in a few blogs, listened to a few audio books and watched some videos. I never took any notes or kept the resources handy. So every time some one asks me for the resources, I just had to tell them that I don’t have any. I want to change that with this and some upcoming posts.
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Installing Linux On Acer Aspire 7
It is now old news that I purchased a new laptop. While it proved its mettle as a gaming laptop for what ever casual gaming that I do, its primary purpose is for work. And work I cannot do in Windows. I had to install Linux. Some of you might know that installing Linux is not quite as straight forward, especially on new hardware. There is a saying that you should buy hardware that is 6 months old for Linux to have all the drivers working and quirks ironed out. The reason is that many companies (read Intel, AMD, Nvidia etc), write drivers for Windows first and then they may write one for Linux. For when there are no drivers, some one from the open source community will have to reverse engineer and build drivers. This has been the state of affairs but Linux is now catching up. Anyway, in this post I will cover all the things I had to do to get Linux working on Acer Aspire 7 with Nvidia GTX 1650.
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Acer Aspire 7 Review
As you already know, I recently purchased a budget gaming laptop – Acer Aspire 7 with Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics card. I really did not need a gaming laptop because I barely play games anymore. But the deal was so good compared to a similarly spec’ed laptop without the graphics card, that I could not pass up the deal. It’s been only 10 days since I have the laptop under my possession, but that does not deter me from writing a review. If you are also looking to buy this laptop, this post might help you in making a decision. If you are not planing to buy one and are still reading, you might be here to pass some time. Either way have fun.
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