• Year In Review – 2020 Investments and Redemptions

    In the past few posts, I have written about my expenses, investment returns and net worth. In this post I want to show you my investment pattern over the last year. I will try to explain my weird investment behavior. A word of caution though. Do not copy my investment style. It will most likely do you more harm than good. The reason is quite simple. I am a retired person with no income. If I had a salary I would certainly invest differently (read more equity investments). I will most certainly do my monthly investments and not the random investments as you will soon see.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Net Worth

    Continuing on with the year in review series, next up is net worth. This year I wanted to make a small change to my net worth calculations. For the last 2 years I have included my US stocks (employee stocks) as part of my net worth. That has caused a lot of confusion to my readers. While my company stocks in the US are worth something, I am planning to keep it out of the reviews. That corpus is supposed to be used for my international (mostly US) vacation. So no point dragging it into net worth calculations.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Daughter's Portfolio

    You know that I am managing a small corpus for my daughter. Since there is no goal involved and it is an experiment, I decided to go all in with equity investments. The plan is to hand over the portfolio to my daughter when she become a major. This will be a nice experiment to check if my quest for low volatility portfolio coupled with market timing is any better than just blindly investing in equities. All I am really interested is in the returns as compared with my portfolio.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Expenses

    This is the continuation of my 2020 year in review series. See my previous post if you missed my returns report. As you probably already know, I maintain two set of expenses — one for monthly expenses and another for annual expenses. The monthly expenses include expenses that occur more frequently than once a year and the rest of the expenses go into annual expenses. Lets dive deeper into the report.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Returns

    At the start of every new year I review my portfolio and take stock of my expenses, returns and net-worth. So just like last year I am reviewing my returns for 2020. This is the first of the year in review series. I will also post my expenses and net-worth reviews in upcoming posts. Without wasting too much time, lets get right to it.

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  • Happy New Year 2021!

    Wish you all a very happy new year! Hope this year brings you more health, happiness and prosperity. When I wrote the new year post last year, little did I know that things will change so quickly. We have gone through some turbulent times indeed. I've had my fair share of ups and downs, but on the whole I ended the year on a positive note. Without going into too much detail, let me recount what happened in my life in 2020.

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  • Last Post For The Year

    It is almost the end of the year and I already posted an article on reflecting back on the year. In my reflections I had a few ups and downs during the past year which are sort of covered in the quotes that follow. This post is going to be really short in that sense :). May be some of these apply to you and perhaps you felt something similar at some point in life? This is the last post on reflections for the year I promise!

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  • Change Habits For The New Year

    It is almost the end of the year and it's time to reflect back on 2020. What is the progress on your goals if you made any at the start of the year. Did the events during the year upset your plans? What impact did COVID have on you? Did you come out stronger? Learned something new that you never thought about earlier? Usually I reflect back around this time of the year and make note of my achievements and failures. The details of which will come out next year as usual in my year in review series.

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  • Why Is Sleep Important?

    I sleep too much. Way too much by today's standards. When I tell someone that I sleep at 9:30 pm, I see raised eyebrows. Not sure if their expression is because they think "you are lucky to get to bed by that time". Or may be it is along the lines of "you are too old and have no social life and are not invited to parties, or you are lazy". Either way it does not really matter to me. I decline late night parties and meetings as much as possible. But you know in the modern era you are an outcast if you sleep early.

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  • Grow In Complete Freedom

    When people ask me what is this unschooling thing we are doing, I find it very difficult to answer. Not because I don't know what I feel about unschooling, but because I am unable to articulate my thoughts into words. When you are an unschooled parent, you subconsciously know what it means to you. You can understand why you behave the way you behave or do the things you do given a situation with your child. But it is extremely difficult to explain to others who only understand school or home school.

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