Posts tagged with "inflation"
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Why Is Financial Planning So Hard?
I’ve seen people with various kinds of behaviors when it comes to financial planning. I find it strange. Perhaps it is not strange. Perhaps it is just their history and their experiences in life that make them behave in a certain fashion. I have seen people living in the moment and not worrying about the future and I have seen people with a lot of assets who could have retired 10 years ago, but wouldn’t. The worst part is that they still worry and stress out about losing their job. I am like, – “Dude, if you lose your job, that is the best thing to happen in your life. You can enjoy all the super huge assets that you have saved up”. Crazy world I tell you or perhaps crazy me (more likely).
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Reached A Milestone
We have finally reached an important milestone! But not in a good way :(. While we are sort of minimalists, we still spend quite a bit. As a result, we recently reached a milestone of Rs. 50 lakhs spent on various expenses since we became financially independent in January 2018. Generally people should be proud of their achievements, but this is not one of them :). Still, it is not all too bad. According to my projections of expenses I should have reached the Rs. 50L lakhs milestone by end of 2022, yet we did not reach it until July 2024. So not too bad.
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Year In Review - 2023 Monthly Expenses
It is about time I reviewed my monthly expenses for the past year. I do this activity at the start of every year. There are two kinds of expenses I track. One is monthly expenses which sort of appear most months like food expenses, internet etc. Then there are those expenses that occur once a year or once every few years. Those are considered as annual expenses. In today’s post I will go over the monthly expenses of last year and how it compares with the budget I made at the start of 2023. Lets also look at inflation since my retirement. Later in the post I will inflate my monthly expenses and set a budget for 2024. Lets dig in then.
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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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Is Investing Early Really That Important
Many financial planners and advisors including yours truly will have you believe that it is important to start investing early if you want to have a comfortable retirement corpus. In fact this is the first step I propose in my five step plan to early retirement. After all it makes sense right? You have a long runway if you start early and it will allow compounding to show its effects. Compounding needs time. But is it really all there is to it? The genesis of this thought was an article that I recently read on the internet. While there is a kernel of truth, it is not all its made out to be. Let me try and explain using the information from the article.
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Inflation Affects Poor More Than Rich
RBI has decided to pause the interest rate hike, which indicates that the central bank thinks the inflation might have peaked. While inflation is currently high at slightly over 6%, we Indians are quite used to that kind of inflation anyway. For most of the western world, it is causing a lot of pain. Not just the inflation but the rate hikes by their respective central banks. The rate hikes even affected some banks (think SVB for example). High inflation is a problem for everyone, but it hurts the poor a lot more than the rich. Yet the media makes it sounds like everyone is affected the same way.
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Internet Expenses Inflation
I have covered inflation of so many things in the past. This is one more of them if you haven’t already gotten tired of reading. Inflation causes cost of items to go up over time. Take for example the cost of milk. It was half as expensive some 7 or 8 years ago. But not all things inflate. Some actually reduce in cost as time progresses. Technology for example falls in this space. A 32” TV is cheaper now than it was a couple of years ago because of advances in technology. Internet expenses for a fixed speed falls under this category too. Alternatively, you can think of it in this way – cost of internet remains the same as the speed increases over time.
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Time To Revisit My Expectations?
Most of my finance related numbers for retirement were based on an inflation of 6% and investment returns of 10%. Going by the recent data, neither inflation nor returns are inline with my expectations. We are in a high inflation and low returns period of a market cycle. The worst part is that the returns from both equity and debt are low at the same time. While it is not as bad in India, elsewhere in the world, that is causing a lot of pain. Since the rest of the world will affect India at some point, I thought it was time to revisit my numbers and see if they still make sense in the future as I continue my long retirement journey.
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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:
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Is It The End Of 4% Rule Then?
I have written so many articles on 4% rule, that it feels like I can make a living by just writing about it. Yet we keep coming back to it because times have changed, or may be the 4% rule does not work in Indian context or because it may not work during recession and what not. The latest in this saga is this article I read a few days ago. Without going into too many details, the article suggests that a new research found that the 4% spending rule may be too high and we should probably go for a 1.9% rule instead. That sucks. I made my whole early retirement planning based on the 4% rule and it seems like I may be doomed.
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