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Year In Review - 2021 Monthly Expenses
By now you already know about the two kinds of expenses that I track – monthly and annual expenses. You probably also know that I publish my expense report for the past year and mull over it a bit. Then I create a new budget for the expenses for current year. Following the tradition, here is a post about my monthly expenses in 2021 and the budget for 2022.
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The Decline Of Keeper Culture
With the advent of technology, things are becoming more complicated and less repairable. I don’t remember where I read this, but in the early days when cars were first invented, everyone who owned a car knew how the car worked very well. It is not unexpected to have the car halt every so often and the owner is expected to be able to diagnose and repair it on the road. That means they would have to understand the workings of a car very well. Whether that was true or my memory serves me right or not is debatable. But what is not debatable is my personal experience.
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Year In Review 2021
Every new year I reflect on the last year and write about some of the highlights and low-lights. Continuing that tradition, this post is all about what interesting things have happened in my life in the year gone by. When the year 2021 began, I was hopeful and optimistic because year 2020 has been a particularly bad year on many fronts especially the impact of COVID-19. Unfortunately 2021 was even worse. We saw the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020 and I thought that was bad enough. But in 2021, India was hit by the second wave with a much graver consequences not just in India but all over the world. And yet, here we are looking eye-to-eye at a possible third wave that may hit us even worse.
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How Much Money Is Enough
When it comes to money, everyone has a different opinion about how much money is more than enough. Some may never reach the point of having enough money by anyone’s definition. These are usually low skilled people who earn very little. For them, there is no question of saving or excess money. If they earn well, they eat well that day. When they cannot, they have to go empty stomach for the night. And on the other extreme we have people who are extremely rich by any standard. These are the Bill Gates of the world. They do not really need to work or earn more irrespective of how much they can spend. And then you have a wide spread in-between.
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Difficulties Of Predicting The Stock Market
Every time we talk about the stock market, we either say it is overvalued or undervalued or fairly valued. The valuation may depend on many macro economic factors. One of them is GDP. Normally one would expect market value to be inline with GDP. So if GDP is up, market cap will be up, which basically means stock market is up. However, that is rarely true. Either the market is running ahead of GDP or the GDP is ahead of the market. And the worst part is that it is extremely difficult to predict when the trends will reverse.
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Migrating From WordPress to Jekyll - Other Things
I already explained a few things about how I migrated from WordPress to Jekyll. A few basic things that come for free in WordPress are not available out of the box in Jekyll. Comments section is one example and you already know that I am now using Commento as the comments engine. Another thing that came for free with WordPress was pagination which was missing from Jekyll in the basic form. A few other things that one could add to WordPress using plugins was setting up analytics, rss feeds, site-map, ads, subscription service etc. Here is how I went about adding some of those features in Jekyll.
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Stock Market Is Down, I Mean Up
Just three days ago I was planning to write a post on how Sensex dropped 1190 points. In fact it went down as much as 1879 points at the lowest point in the day. But then I thought, what is the point of writing the post. It will be back up again the next day. Which is precisely what happened for the next 3 days. The stock market was moving up without a break. This has been pretty much how things were for the past several months now. One or two days the market might fall on some random news. Then it will continue on its upwards march for several days. There is absolutely no need to worry about any fall it seems.
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More Resources On Stoicism
A while ago, I wrote a post on Stoicism. The reason I wrote the post is because a few people ask me for resources on Stoicism and I don’t have anything handy. For a while now, I have been collecting some resources (mostly videos), that I wanted to share with the readers of my blog. I could not list out all the resources in the previous post, so I am continuing it with this one. Before I start, I want to let you know that I don’t think Stoicism is better than any other philosophies. I am not recommending that you follow or understand it. If you are curious, then these resources may help you. If you already like a philosophy, you should just stick to it.
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Random News On HNIs and Cryptocurrencies Bill
I have been accumulating some random news that I found interesting over the past few weeks. So thought I’d share my views on them. On the one hand, Indian government is coming up with a bill that may ban or regulate cryptocurrencies and on the other hand we have a major bank announcing that they are embracing cryptocurrencies. Both of these happened on the same day! What contrasting news. Then, one news article mentions very HNIs are not investing much in mutual funds while another one mentions a lot of interest in equities from them. That is not very contrasting because one mentions mutual funds, and the other direct equities, but still it is interesting.
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Commento As Comments Engine In Jekyll
Last time I wrote about my adventures with moving comments engine from Disqus to Remark42. This is a continuation of that story. While I liked pretty much everything about Remark42, one thing that did not work out for me was spam protection. Remark42 does not have, or at least it did not have a proper automated spam protection mechanism in place at the time I tried it out. With the default WordPress comments engine, you could add Akismet for spam protection. I could not figure out any way to install spam filters in Remark42. The only way would be to hold the comments for approval. Then I have to approve each comment manually. This would be too much work for me. Not that I get a lot of comments on the blog, but still, why should a human take care of such things when an automated system could do it for me?
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