Posts tagged with "diy" - page 3
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Building a DIY 5.1 Audio Video Receiver – Part 2
If you did not read part 1 of building a DIY 5.1 AVR, I suggest you start from there. Here is some important points from my previous post --
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Building a DIY 5.1 Audio Video Receiver - Part 1
Alright, you already know the story of my electronics going puff during a power surge. One of the electronics that got burnt was my unnecessarily expensive Pioneer 5.1.2 AVR. The reason I put emphasis on unnecessary is because I rarely used all the features of the device. Don't even know why I spent all the money :). After it stopped working, I opened and checked everything that I could figure out. But I didn't notice any obvious problems. The AVR just boots up, turns on the amplifier relay and turns off. Since it failed during COVID lock down, I couldn't do much about it.
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Rain Water Harvesting Project
When it came to self-sustainability, I was interested in doing three projects -- growing organic vegetables, setting up water harvesting and generating power from solar panels. While we cannot certainly be fully self sustaining if I completed the projects, we could at least be less dependent on outside factors. A while ago we started growing vegetables in our side yard and terrace. I need to get around to writing a post on it. Some topic or the other always comes up and I write a post on it and eventually the post on terrace garden is way overdue. I did not want to let the same thing happen to this project which we started working on setting up recently. So here is something on that topic. The work is not yet fully done, but if I wait, I may end up never getting around to 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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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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How Long Will My Money Last?
How long will your money last? The oft given cliched answer is -- it depends. It is true if you want someone to answer for you. But if you put some effort, you will be able to answer the question yourself. The only problem is that you should be able to make some good estimates of your expenses, inflation and investment return long into the future.
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How Much Do You Need To Retire?
I have touched upon this point briefly in step 5 of How to Retire Early in 5 Steps, but I thought I should expand a bit on that. Most people suggest the 4% rule, which basically states that if your expenses can be met by withdrawing 4% of your corpus, then that should be the corpus size. For example, if you need Rs. 50,000 per month to meet all your expenses comfortably in your retirement, then your corpus needs to be Rs. 50,000 * 12 / 4% = Rs. 1.5 crores. But does it really work?
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How Soon Can You Retire?
Like I mentioned in the previous post, there are really just two variables that you can control, which determine how soon you can retire. They are your expenses and savings. Remember step 4 of How to Retire Early in 5 Steps? Plan a Simple Retired Life. The lesser the expenses today, the less it will be in future after adjusting for inflation. If you like a rich lifestyle today, then as the years go by, not only will inflation cause the expenses to go up, but you will want higher and better lifestyle which adds up. Your savings will not be able to handle the burden of your expenses. The less your expenses, and more your savings, the earlier you can retire. But how soon? That is the question that I want to answer in this post.
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