Posts tagged with "expenses" - page 3
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What Was My Savings Rate
A lot of times while talking to people about my early retirement, I get to the point of someone wanting to know what percent of my income I was saving. Unfortunately I never tracked that metric. So I wanted to find that out myself which is what this post is all about. The information may not be very accurate but it should be a ballpark figure and has sufficient details in it. The reason for inaccuracy is primarily because I don’t want to track down all my investments and income to the minutest detail. That would take too much time. In fact I don’t even remember my salary information and used my ITR (income tax returns) as a guideline. Then I had to go through my CAMS statement to figure out my investments every year. Hope this helps answer the question about my savings rate.
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Real World Application of 4% Rule
I have not even completed 4 years into retirement, yet I wanted to check how the 4% rule is working for me. Please keep in mind that this is such a short time in retirement that we can’t make any conclusions about whether 4% rule really works in this day and age at all in India. We will only know its usefulness in a much longer duration like a decade or so. This exercise is to understand how a 4% rule will work with and without the 20% buffer I usually talk about. Lets get started.
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Cash Flow In Retirement
I realized that I don't have a post on how I fund my expenses after retirement. So here is something to help you understand my cash flow. Most of the numbers shared here depend on my monthly expenses. So please keep the Rs. 50,000 per month expenses in your head while reading the post.
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Mistakes To Avoid If You Plan To Retire Early
There is no one straightforward way to reach the goal of early retirement. Although many people have attempted to streamline the process. And that includes me (see my 5 steps to early retirement) :). There are several other small things that you need to take care of before the grand picture emerges. One of them is expenses.
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Comparison With Another FIRE Couple
You know how I like to compare myself with other FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early) individuals. So here is one more of them. I do the comparison because there are very few of them and I just started my journey. So comparing with others helps me understand how they think, behave and spend. That way I can check if I am inline with them or whether I am an outlier. Either of those situations is alright with me, but it is just a fun exercise.
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Trimming Expenses
In my last post I mentioned that I was confident of my approach to early retirement. In addition I wrote about a couple who have been retired for 30 years by just following the 4% rule. One of the learning from that post is that there could be a huge drop in market that may hit my investments badly. In that case my investments may not keep up with my expenses. For example if there is a prolonged market slump. And I need a plan. The plan starts with cutting down my expenses temporarily so that my investments can catch up.
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How and When I Decided To Retire
A friend and reader of my blog asked me this question -- I don't know if you covered this in the blog, but could you write about how you arrived at a number for net worth where you felt comfortable retiring. I have written about my retirement journey which is scattered across many posts. So I thought I should consolidate and revisit the topic for the benefit of new readers.
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Year In Review – 2020 Expenses
This is the continuation of my 2020 year in review series. See my previous post if you missed my returns report. As you probably already know, I maintain two set of expenses — one for monthly expenses and another for annual expenses. The monthly expenses include expenses that occur more frequently than once a year and the rest of the expenses go into annual expenses. Lets dive deeper into the report.
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Change Habits For The New Year
It is almost the end of the year and it's time to reflect back on 2020. What is the progress on your goals if you made any at the start of the year. Did the events during the year upset your plans? What impact did COVID have on you? Did you come out stronger? Learned something new that you never thought about earlier? Usually I reflect back around this time of the year and make note of my achievements and failures. The details of which will come out next year as usual in my year in review series.
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How To Plan Your Financial Independence
Several people have routinely asked me whether I planned for this or that before deciding to retire early. Well I planned the way that works for me under my circumstances. There is no one size fits all and no one comprehensive definite solution. None the less, since so many people have this question about how to go about planning for financial independence, I thought I should write a post about it.
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