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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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How to Choose a Debt Mutual Fund
Hopefully you have read my post on how to choose a mutual fund. This post is kind of an extension to it. I will specifically explain what things you need to look for when picking a debt mutual fund as opposed to the general advice given in the other post. While I don't consider myself an expert, I will give you some tips based on my experience. But first, the usual disclaimer:
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Bored In Retirement. Not.
When I announced my early retirement, some well wishers asked me if I would get bored with so much time on my hands at such productive age. When I told them that I will be working on some fun projects, which should keep me busy, they still wondered if I would feel bored after 6 or 9 months. Some call or email me every few months to see how I am doing. My relatives ask my parents if I am getting bored. It is now almost 9 months since I retired and yet my To-Do list keeps on growing and there is no scope for boredom. But it is fun that way because I am working on the things that keeps me interested and excited to jump out of the bed every morning to tackle them.
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Debt Funds vs Fixed Deposits
If you ask someone whether Fixed Deposits are better or Debt funds are better, more likely than not, you will hear a biased answer towards either of them. Some swear by FDs and their safety, while others say debt funds always give better returns than FDs. Lets bust some myths and try to get an understanding of how these two types of investments work.
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The Peer-to-Peer Lending Experiment
It is 3 years to this day, when I first decided to get my feet wet with a new type of investment -- peer-to-peer lending. While peer-to-peer lending is nothing new in countries such as the US at that time, it was relatively new in India. After reading about the lending platform called LenDenClub, I decided to give it a try to see if I could get some good returns.
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Do You Need International Exposure
India is a growth story. As a developing nation, we obsess over growth rates. While most analysts hope for a sustained 8% growth rate from India, our government has sometimes vowed to take India into double digit growth. I am not really sure if that is even possible. Nonetheless, every time the growth rate falls just below 7%, media and analysts make a huge deal about it worrying why the rate is so low. A developing nation is expected to have a high growth rate and so do a lot of investors. So, should one invest in international funds which have a slower growth rate?
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