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Our Unschooling Journey
Our journey towards unschooling was a bit haphazard and not a straight forward decision. In the initial years we were unclear whether we wanted to home school our kid or not. I have always wondered if I would have gained more knowledge and moved faster in life if I was home schooled. As a kid I used to complain that I wish I would not be forced to study all the subjects that we were taught in school. I asked my parents if there is a school where I can only study math, physics, chemistry and computers and nothing else. This was way back in 5th standard or so, when I was may be 10 or 11 years.
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My Expenses Compared with MMM
Some of you might have heard of Mr. Money Mustache (MMM), who retired at the age of 30 in the US and is quite popular in the F.I.R.E world. I have always wanted to compare my expenses with him and see if I can be as good as him with my expenses. I always believe that there are some similarities when I compare myself with him (like workouts, DIY, minimalism etc). My expenses should also be similar then? You know that I have this habit of looking back at my expenses in the past year and write a post on it in the beginning of the new year. This year, MMM also posted his expenses on his blog, so it was easy for me to compare my expenses with his. So am I better at managing my expenses compared to him? Lets find out. The results may surprise you!
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Income Tax Reporting
While the name "income tax reporting" seems to suggest that you only need to report income, it is not really the case. It has been expanded to report investments that you already have, whether they gave you any income or not during the assessment year. After reading a comment on one of my blog posts I became aware of the fact that some people might be misinformed about what is supposed to be reported.
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Hundred Posts and Counting
I passed a wonderful milestone today. This is my 100th post on this blog. I did not realize that I was so close to this milestone. When I first started I did not have any intentions of doing it for the long term. It was supposed to be just an online dairy. I wanted to pen down my daily activities and thoughts so I can recollect the memories and rediscover the days gone by. But thanks to encouragement from friends and family it grew into a blog for helping others :)
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Why Do We Unschool Our Kid?
You probably already know by now that we are unschooling our kid. Unschooling is the more extreme version of home schooling. Why did we take this bold step? A lot of people have been asking the same question. So I thought I should explain our thought process.
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Tax Audit
I was recently audited by the Income Tax Department and thought that the whole faceless scrutiny process was interesting. So here is something about it. It seems like I was one of those people who got randomly selected for Limited Scrutiny (Computer Aided Scrutiny Selection). It was the government's way of testing out the e-Proceedings facility.
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Interest Rates On Govt. Schemes Have Been Cut
Finally some good news that I have been waiting for. The interest rates for the governments schemes have come down. Just in yesterday's post I have been complaining about the high interest rates of many of these schemes have been the barrier for the rate cut transmissions.
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What To Do During The Crisis and Lockdown?
The Indian government has called for a lockdown for 21 days. So you must all be at home with family including kids. So I am guessing you must be experiencing a taste of my life! Meanwhile the markets are doing things they are best known for, i.e. being irrational. Well, actually if you ask me, the markets seem more rational now than before. On the other hand, government and RBI are doing lots of things to overcome the negative impact of COVID-19 on people and economy. While analysts, bigwigs and news personnel are scaring the pants off us, complaining that governments are not doing enough and that there is an impending recession. It does not matter what everyone is doing, thinking or how irrational the market is, you can be more rational during these trying times and take it as an opportunity.
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Organic Gardening: Shade Net, Drips and Harvest 2.0
In one of the earlier posts, I talked about the shade net setup that we worked on in 2019. We only set the shade net on a small part of the terrace as a test and it worked brilliantly in protecting the plants. The rest of the plants outside of the shade net area were not handling the sun well. So we wanted to finish the rest of the terrace too. In the mean time, monsoon hit and the original shade net was all torn in many places, so it needed replacement. From that we understood that the shade net might need to be re-done every year after monsoon :). Eventually, after the monsoon we set down to work on the rest of the shade net project, dubbed 2.0 for obvious reasons :P
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How Am I Handling the Market
Given the current market situation, a few of my friends wanted to know how my portfolio is doing and what have I been doing during the crisis. So this post should hopefully answer these questions. I want to preface by saying that don't be fooled by randomness. I may have performed better or worse than you expect and it does not mean I made any smart moves nor that I made mistakes. Only note that luck favors the prepared.
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