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The Markets Of 2023
The year 2023 is behind us, and this year was definitely less eventful than the past 3 years. Since COVID hit, things have changed quite a bit. It all started with the virus of course that wreaked havoc all over the world at the same time. There were a lot of side effects. Many lost loved ones, we were restricted to home isolation and lock downs were introduced. For the first time ever, we had everything closed including schools. Only the emergency services were running. The new work from home culture started. Then came pumping money in the fear and anticipation of reduced spending. The free flow of money caused inflation because people now had more money but nowhere to spend. Remember, everything was closed, so you could spend on nothing but food and health. Then came interest rate hikes to control the inflation. What a crazy ride.
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Our First Step Towards True Retirement - Part 2
Happy new year everyone! I want to continue where I left off in my previous post, so if you haven’t read that, I suggest you head over there first to get some context. The year was 2022, and like I mentioned in the previous post, we were thinking about farm life and were not sure if we can adapt to it after living in the city for such a long time. Since a few of our unschooling friends were living on farms far away from the city we thought it would be a good idea to visit their farm and see how they live and take care of their daily activities in such remote places. It will help us answer some long standing questions.
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Our First Step Towards True Retirement - Part 1
If you have been paying attention to the last few posts, you know that we are cutting down our sustainability efforts here at home. We first stopped rain water harvesting. Then slowly started to reduce our organic gardening footprint. None of these decisions were taken on a whim. They were deliberate and well thought out. While I mentioned some of the reasons for slowing down the projects, one reason which I did not mention was that we were not finding enough time. Yes I know, it sounds strange coming from a person who (and his better half) have completely retired and have not worked for money for more than 5 years. Yet, here we are. We finally realized our long-held dream of becoming owners of a farm and that kept us busy.
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Terrace Gardening Update
There are three places where we have been doing organic gardening. One on either sides of the house, two on the terrace and three outside of our compound wall. I already gave an update on the garden on either sides of the house. Since I’d like to keep you guys up to date, in this post I am giving an update on the terrace garden and the garden that is outside. Now for the bad news. We recently stopped doing the terrace gardening. There are a few reasons which I will get to in a minute. Meanwhile, our outside garden is still doing fine, but not to the level we want.
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A Confusing Time In Stock Market
The Indian stock market has been unrelenting in its growth. It feels like yesterday when I wrote that Sensex crossed the 60,000 milestone. Now, just 2 years later it is about to cross 70,000. But there is nothing impressive about it because that is a relatively low growth rate of 8%. Hardly anything to write about since we expect markets to do at least double digit growth. What is really impressive is that the market doubled in just three and a half years, which is a solid 22% growth. In June 2020, Sensex was around 35,000. The long term Sensex returns are around 13-14%. So should we be worried about a market crash?
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Lessons From 30 Years
Charlie Munger passed away recently at 99 years of age, just 34 days away from reaching 100. His life lessons are timeless and worth learning. If you have any interest in finance and investing you surely must have heard of him. He is the business partner and a good friend of Warren Buffett. As a result you must have seen blogs or emails about his famous quotes and life lessons. I did not want to bore you again with the same quotes. Instead, I recently came across a blog post on 40 lessons from 30 years. I thought it was interesting and wanted to see if I agree with any of them and how I measured up in my life. You should read the post and see if it applies to you too.
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DC Energy Measurement Using PZEM 017
You might remember that I have been looking for an accurate DC current measuring device for a long time for my solar project. The hall effect sensors I have been using in my solar project was inaccurate. Basically the zero current point drifts quite a bit depending on the ambient temperature and power supply voltage. While a shunt would give more accurate zero cross overs, I did not want to modify my setup to use it. You see, the problem with shunt resistor based sensors was that they have to be inline with current. Which means I have to remove a bunch of wiring from my battery and UPS and insert these sensors inline. I was not willing to do that. However I recently came across another project which would be a good fit to test out these shunt resistor based sensors. So I tried a couple of them and what follows is my experience with one of them.
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Rain Water Harvesting Update
A long time ago, soon after I retired we build a DIY rain water harvesting at our place. We even made some upgrades along the way. Since it rains a lot here in Bangalore (or I should say used to rain a lot), we enjoyed a few good years of rain water harvest. For those of you who don’t know, there is huge water shortage here in Bangalore and any water we can save is extremely helpful. We generally use about 22 tankers of water in a year. But since setting up the rain water harvesting, it has reduced to almost half. Thus not only saving money but also water.
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Organic Gardening Update
As we progress in life, things come and go. We start out with a plan and later it may fail or we stop executing it for some reason. Take the most common failed plans that most people complain about – exercise. When the new year rolls in some of us plan to exercise routinely and stay fit. Eventually, due to various reasons, some stop doing it. There were several plans I made after retirement, and some of them have either failed or we stopped them intentionally. One such plan was organic gardening. Just after retiring, we started to grow a small vegetable garden in the open space on the sides of our house inside our compound. I even built and programmed an automated drip irrigation system so we don’t have to worry about watering. But we stopped growing vegetables on the sides. So what happened?
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Be Prepared For Retirement
There are many reasons one might want to retire early. Some may want to travel, some may want to sit and dream, and yet others might want to work on a startup or hobbies. Whatever the reasons might be, be prepared if the plan does not pan out. But more importantly remember that early retirement is not for everyone. I know a lot of people who have realized that early retirement is not for them. They don’t know what they would do if they retire early. For them, work is the thing that keeps them busy. That is a very good reason not to retire early and I am glad these people have a clear idea. While a few others want to retire early because the thought of freedom to do whatever you want sounds nice, or they are in a very stressful job. These kind of people can land up in trouble if they don’t have a plan.
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