-
Vehicle Inflation
Since I recently purchased a new car, my insurance has shot up quite a bit. I thought this would be a good time to look at my vehicle insurance inflation before the major jump. As I always say, it does not matter what the government published inflation numbers say, the question is how much is your personal inflation. Your corpus, the safe withdrawal rate and thus your financial independence depends on your inflation. So it is always a good idea to know your inflation numbers. In the past, I’ve written a few posts on our inflation of a few things. Here are some of them if you are interested:
...continue reading -
Savings Due To Solar Panel
Last year, around this time, I wrote a post on how much money my solar panel was saving us. I was supposed to write a follow up to it after one year, but I completely forgot about it. Thankfully, a reader reminded me to give an update and here I am. Unfortunately even after one year I still did not finish the software that was supposed to instantly tell me how much I am saving each month. I should be able to get that information because I have a bunch of sensors monitoring my solar panel system. They measure the power generated by the panel, the amount of power we are using at home and how much power we are drawing from grid. All that data is stored in the cloud in Firebase. Yet I did not finish that part of the software. And to think I am actually retired. Wonder where all my free time goes. Anyway, in this post I will give a guesstimate using our electricity bills as a proxy.
...continue reading -
Reusing Old Android Tablets
Before I retired, I used to work as an Android engineer in a reputable company. One of the benefits of working in an android team is that we get access to a lot of devices and form factors so we can test our products (the android apps that we build) on various devices. As a result, I have a bunch of android mobile devices and tablets. I will show off the collection in another post some day. After I quit, we were allowed to keep some of the old devices and use them for personal work. However, we are not allowed to sell them or give away to non family members. So I thought I need to put them to good use.
...continue reading -
Tools I Use To Repair Stuff
A few posts ago, I started writing about the tools I use to repair various things at home based on a request from a reader of my blog. Here is a continuation of that series. I already covered what tools I use to repair and build electronics. In this post I want to cover the tools I used to repair some mechanical items such as cycle or washing machine etc. I won’t go into too much detail explaining every tool that I have. I just want to show you what I have to do some basic repairs. I still feel like I don’t have enough tools, so this is not a comprehensive set that you need. These are somethings that worked for me and perhaps will work for you too.
...continue reading -
Taking Care Of Rechargeable Batteries
For all the great things that are talked about Li-ion batteries, I do not have a good feeling about them. I agree they are much lighter than lead acid batteries and can probably handle more current. But I always felt the maintenance and life of these batteries is far worse than traditional batteries. Take the case of phones or laptops. In spite of taking great care, they generally don’t last as long. Most of my phone batteries show lowered performance after 3 years and very poor performance after 5 years. I am sometimes left with swollen batteries. And to think we are using Li-ion batteries in EVs. I wonder how long they will really last when the environment they operate in is much harsher when compared to laptops and phones.
...continue reading -
Our Income Sources In Retirement
While I mentioned my retirement income sources many times before in my blog, I still get questions about that. So I thought I will revisit our income sources after our early retirement in 2018. It has been more than 4 years since we retired and nothing has changed in terms of income sources. I think most people are skeptical when I say I retired early and wonder if I am getting income from multiple sources. Actually that would be a good, probably correct way to retire early. But like many things in my life, I have taken huge risks with very little recourse if things fail. Having a plan B means I don’t have enough trust in Plan A. So plan B really is to make plan A work (you heard that one before didn’t you?). So in this post I will list out all our income sources again.
...continue reading -
Expenses Revisited: 2022 Edition
Hopefully you understood how I funded the purchase of a new car. The summary of it is that I already anticipated all kinds of expenses I might encounter in retirement and then some (called as miscellaneous). Based on those expenses I figured out a corpus big enough to handle not just our living expenses (called as monthly expenses), but the major expenses such as buying a car or laptop or new furniture etc called as annual expenses. I will get to that number in a minute. So using my investments, I was able to fund my car. Basically, I sold a few units of my debt mutual funds and paid for the car in full. In this post I would like to revisit our cumulative expenses and corpus as on date after the major car purchase expense.
...continue reading -
How I Funded Purchase Of A New Car
If you have been following my past few posts, you already know that I purchased a new car. You might also recall that the budget I set for the new car was Rs. 6 lakhs. In this post I want to answer some of the questions that might be popping in your mind including why I have a specific budget and how I funded it. I have just one portfolio which is my retirement corpus. I don’t maintain different portfolios for different goals, because I only have one goal which is to stay retired for ever :). The retirement corpus is supposed to fund all expenses in my retirement. It could be any monthly expenses like food, petrol, electricity, kids expenses etc. Or it could be some big annual expenses such as buying a car or painting the house etc. If you want more details, I suggest you follow the links above and read about my expenses first. I explained everything in detail.
...continue reading -
Goodbye Alto, Welcome Ignis
This is the continuation of my previous post on buying a new car. As we established, I decided to buy a new car instead of an used car. The reasons are mentioned in my previous two posts. After having shortlisted a few interesting new cars, I test drove a sample from each manufacturer that I was interested in. In the end, I kept coming back to Maruti cars for one big reason – the engine. Of course, the main reason that only Maruti came out on the top in engine quality and not the other Japanese brands like Honda or Toyota is because I excluded them as they did not fall within my budget. If you didn’t already know, I kept a strict budget of Rs. 6 lakhs for buying a new car. I will get into the reasons as to why only Rs. 6 lakhs in my next post.
...continue reading -
The Hunt For A New Car Begins
If you didn’t already know, it was time for my almost 15 year old Maruti Alto car to be re-registered. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I was contemplating whether to renew the registration or buy a used/new car altogether. From what I gathered, it will cost me some 30-40K on my old car to get it registered for another 5 years. The problem was that I was not sure that it will pass the fitness test even with all the repairs. Moreover, the new registration is valid only for another 5 years. I felt it may be better to sell the car and buy another used or a new car instead of spending the money on it. Then I faced another problem which tipped the scale in favor of buying a new car. First, I could not find a decent used car. Second, I found that it was not easy to sell my old car.
...continue reading
