Posts tagged with "expenses" - page 2


  • Withdrawal Plan In Retirement

    After my post on lumpsum vs SIP investment, a reader asked – “Wanted to understand the other side - how to redeem from our funds after we retire? Say we have calculated the number and we have enough. But, the challenge is how to get to a withdrawal mode from accumulation mode. You have showcased how you do it in some articles but can you do it with some numbers for a fictitious person? Ex: Age 40. Amount 6Cr spread across multiple equity and debt funds and US Stocks. Now, how to withdraw to last till their age of 85 for an expense of 1L per month (corpus is 50 times)?”. I thought it is an interesting question that needs answering. I will go with the numbers given by the reader and work out an example in this post.

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  • Year In Review - 2022 Annual Expenses

    In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. This is the continuation of that post and I will be covering my annual expenses in 2022. While monthly expenses are those kind of expenses that occur more frequently, yearly expenses occur rarely, perhaps once every few years like house repairs or buying a new car etc. I will explain where we are spending the most and why. Remember that for all the expenses, whether monthly or annual, the money is coming out of my retirement corpus which consists of a bunch of debt and equity mutual funds. There are no other incomes or special savings for annual expenses. Every year since retirement we have seen different kinds of expenses and last year wasn’t any different either.

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  • Year In Review - 2022 Monthly Expenses

    You already know about the two kinds of expenses that I track – monthly and annual expenses. You probably also know that I publish my expense report for the past year and mull over it a bit. Then I create a new budget for the expenses for current year. Following the tradition, here is a post about my monthly expenses in 2022 and the budget for 2023.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • How Is 4% Rule Working Out For Me?

    I ended the previous post with a resounding “yes” for the question on whether 4% rule works in India or not. I also mentioned that given what we know about current inflation and return expectations in India, we can assume that the investment will last about 50 years assuming a conservative 30% asset allocation. In this article I want to show you how my portfolio was performing because I retired based on 4% rule with a bit of a buffer. So how is that working out for me? Given the market correction in the past few months and the increasing inflation, am I draining more money than I expected and am I at risk of out living my corpus? Lets find out.

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  • Saving Strategy Of A Minimalist

    The normal advice you hear from people is that you need to pay yourself first. Basically what it means is that as soon as you get your salary or other income, you need to save up for your goals first and then only spend what is remaining. Save up for your goals basically entails paying SIPs for each of your goals according to your plan. The advice is sound indeed. Otherwise some people may not be able to save enough to reach their goals. If they spend first and invest last then their expenses might eat up into the savings.

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  • Should You Be Worried About Inflation

    For the past few months we have been hearing about the increasing inflation in the US. Is it possible that the same could happen in India and should we be worried? First lets try to understand the severity of inflation in the US. The inflation number in the US used to hover around 2% for the longest time. But it has shot up to as high as 7.9% in February 2022. That is almost 4 times as high as the average! That does hurt. It is a number not seen in 40 years! In India, the inflation is still not that high, so we don’t have to worry as much as our friends over on the other side of the world. Still, it is always useful to do a thought experiment and see if it is a topic of concern.

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  • Year In Review - 2021 Annual Expenses

    In the previous post I wrote about my monthly expenses. So in this post I will be covering my annual expenses in 2021. While monthly expenses are those kind of expenses that occur more frequently, yearly expenses occur rarely, perhaps once every few years like house repairs or buying a new laptop etc. Once I go over the expenses I will explain why we spent where and then we will move on to the budget for this year. Every year after retirement has been different with an interesting set of expenses that were never seen in the previous year. Last year wasn’t different either.

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  • Year In Review - 2021 Monthly Expenses

    By now you already know about the two kinds of expenses that I track – monthly and annual expenses. You probably also know that I publish my expense report for the past year and mull over it a bit. Then I create a new budget for the expenses for current year. Following the tradition, here is a post about my monthly expenses in 2021 and the budget for 2022.

    ...continue reading