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Am I Financially Ready To Retire?
Here is an alternative take on whether you are financially ready to retire. In this post, I want to help you determine if you are ready to quit with nothing but a simple calculator and just one formula. You don't need to predict expenses, inflation, rate of return etc, and as such, this method is not as comprehensive as the How Soon Can I Retire calculator. So take it with a pinch of salt and use it more as an indicator of whether you are ready to retire or not. Also note that this is only to check if you are financially fit to retire and has nothing to do with your emotional state of mind. Some may have a lot of money and yet cannot retire due to various other reasons (including not knowing what to do post retirement, fear of boredom, peer pressure, family disapproval, social status etc).
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Upgrading my Router: Asus RT-AC58U vs Tenda AC10
This is the continuation and the conclusion post of my previous post. So if you have missed it, head on over there first. As you know, I have decided to upgrade my old TP-Link router with Asus RT-AC58U. Initially I was extremely happy with the performance although it was running a little hot. The performance and coverage was just great. But things turned south as soon as I tried using it as a NAS. While I know that the processor on the router will not be powerful enough as a dedicated NAS, it performed quite poorly in my opinion.
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Upgrading my Router: Asus RT-AC58U
My aging router has been causing trouble for a few months now and it was time to upgrade it. I tried a couple of routers and thought I should do a quick review comparing them in case it helps some one because at the time I was taking the decision, there wasn't a good comparison between the two. So the story begins about 6 months ago when my old TP-Link TL-WR740N router was evicting devices, or not letting new devices connect after a certain number of devices have connected. I don't know the maximum number of connections it can handle, but I think anything beyond 12 devices is giving it the fits.
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Renewing Passport in Bangalore
Just wanted to do a quick post on my experience renewing passport in Bangalore. May be this will help someone. So the story goes like this -- my passport is about to expire in 10 months and my daughter's is expiring in 4 months. We thought it might be a good time to start the renewal process not knowing how long it will take to renew. While my passport renewal could wait, I wanted to finish it along with my daughter in one go, instead of wasting time again for my passport renewal. Created a couple of accounts (one for myself and one for my daughter) on passportindia.gov.in.
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Funding Child's Education Expenses
In the past, I wrote about how to fund children's education expenses, but some of my readers felt that there should be a calculator to figure out education expenses. So naturally, I am obliged to fill the gap with this calculator. I would strongly urge you to read the previous post before using this calculator to understand the basics first. Lets get some shortcomings of the calculator out of the way before using it.
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How to Change Scooter Battery
Recently, the trusted battery in my scooter finally died. We own a Hero Honda Pleasure and its battery has never been replaced since we purchased it in 2011. That is a full 8 years of service, which is quite amazing for a scooter battery. Anyway, we decided to replace it. Now, I have replaced car batteries a couple of times so far, but this would be the first time replacing a scooter battery. However, the instructions in the scooter manual for replacing the battery were surprisingly simple. So I thought there should be a post about it, because ... why not?
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Form 15G and 15H
It is the start of the financial year and now is a good time to figure out if you need to submit form 15G or 15H. For most individuals, this probably does not apply, but it may be applicable for your parents or if you or your spouse have a nil tax liability. In this post, lets go over when, why, where, who and how one can submit form 15G/15H.
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Main Door Project
A while ago, our home's main door has been giving us a few problems. It has been about 8 years since we moved into our newly constructed house and seems like the maintenance work is now starting to creep up. The first sign of problems started when the door was sagging down at the hinges due to it's own weight. Being the front door of the house, it is quite heavy, and the clearance between the door frame and the door was very small to start with. As the cycles of the weather took their toll on the door, it slowly inched its way down until it started rubbing against the wooden frame at the bottom, and eventually getting stuck there when the door was closed.
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The Nun-Chucks Project
So far in this blog, I have been posting articles with advice and tips about finance and how to retire early. But when I started the blog, I did not intend to keep it strictly about retirement or finance. I just wanted to post my journey to retirement and retirement activities. My posts have been about financial planning, tips and advice, mostly upon requests from friends and colleagues. This post, and probably a few more upcoming posts will be a deviation from that style :D , since I want to write something about post retirement activities. You may skip this one if you are here just for some financial advice.
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Financial Support for Your Parents
You are currently working and deriving a salary. It is easy to support your parents with the salary. But how about when you retire? Hopefully, you have included supporting your parents as part of your expenses when calculating how much do you need to retire. Alternatively, they have enough corpus or other income that will let them support themselves and live independently. In my case, it was a mix of both and I thought I should explain how I am handling it. May be it will help you get some clarity on how you want to go about it.
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