Posts tagged with "planning"
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What Is The Right Asset Allocation
In discussions with various people, the question about asset allocation always comes up. Some want to know what asset allocation they should follow. Others question my asset allocation. Unfortunately, there is no one answer for what asset allocation one should go with. Everyone’s situation is different and their risk appetite is different. They should go wih an asset allocation that they are comfortable with. If they can’t figure it out by themselves, then they should hire a financial planner who can tell them what asset allocation to go with given their situation and mindset. If you push me to give one number, I always say 70% in equity and the rest in fixed income if you plan to retire early, but even otherwise too. In this post I want to go into some nuances.
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Changes To Extraordinary Items Reporting
Recently I made some changes to how I report my extraordinary items. These items could be expenses or income. An extraordinary item is an unusual expense or income that is not accounted for in budget. Generally, I have planned expenses and have a budget for them, but in some rare cases, I had either unexpected income or expense that was not planned. Earlier, I used to consider all extraordinary income as growth in corpus and all extraordinary expenses as growth in expenses. But lately I have changed the reporting. Now, both extraordinary expense and income are considered as growth or drop in corpus. I applied the changes retroactively to all old expenses too. Read on to understand why I made this change.
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Year In Review - 2023 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 2023. 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. Last year’s annual expenses were low because thankfully we did not have any big ticket item like buying a car.
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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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Over Planning and Under Planning
I am the kind of person who tends to over plan and execute according to it. I hate deviations in the plan. But since retirement I am trying hard to change this style. You see, early retirement is all about enjoying life as it comes, but here I am programmed to execute according to a plan. Don’t get me wrong, my incessant planning and careful execution is what got me to retiring as early as I did. So it is not like I am going to throw away this trait. It helped me a lot. At the same time, I don’t want to be a carefree soul without a plan. That would be quite careless if not reckless. Instead I want to try something different, a middle ground if I can call it that.
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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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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.
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News - A Helpful Guide To The Investor?
It is extremely funny to read stock market news. These days there is almost no useful news at all when it comes to investing. Makes me wonder why I still follow financial and business news. I will take up the case with a few articles that all arrived in my news feed on the same day plus some.
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