2021 was a swing year with pandemic turning more deadly than ever at start and is still turning out to be a mystery with Omicron variant hitting new peaks as I write this post.

Finance

2021 was a good year in terms of Finance. My current value in stocks and mutual funds by end of the year doubled compared to the start aided by the bull run and good savings rate due to work from home throughout the year. I paid off the money I technically owed during marriage and took up a new one which we will get to in a minute. Given the pain of a bear market in first half of 2020 and optimism of markets in the second half of 2020 I just maxed out my mutual fund and stocks. In case of stocks it’s mostly buying and holding large cap with around 10% as fun money to buy small/mid-cap. The absolute profit stands at 20% and 35% for stocks and mutual fund portfolio since I kept averaging with little in cash as post-tax returns on FD and debt instruments are low enough to just hold in savings account for better liquidity. I also switched to arbitrage funds from debt since I feel they are good to park for short term providing 4-5% and also treated as STCG of 15% compared to 30% in debt funds when retrieved within 3 years. There was a little 10% dip around November but it’s about discipline and sticking with the plan as most of the money in the market is something I hopefully don’t need in 5-10 years.

I will also have my ELSS schemes completing 3 years and I am looking to consolidate them as lockin expires. My tax saver FD will also be over. It’s the first investment I did after a job change in 2016 for the tax year. I find this to be a poor one with 30% tax on the interest that I could have just bought ELSS that would have better returns from equity even without the 2020 bull run with LTCG at 10% post 1 lakh limit per year. So I am just looking forward to consolidating that too in my portfolio. Given that the investments were 3-5 years it also makes me realize time flies fast!

Amount invested = 1,00,000
Maturity = 1,39,000
30% tax on interest = -11,700
Post tax maturity = 1,27,300 (27% total return after 5 years)

I also took my first loan. It seems that taking a loan is a ritual to reach the adult phase that somehow it creeps in though I deliberately avoided it for years. I took a car loan and finally bought a new Swift VXI automatic. Yeah, you might say taking a loan to buy a deprecating asset but second hand automatic was little hard to find during a pandemic. Talking about buying at peak, a new version was released with better engine and features after a month though current one is good too averaging around 18kmpl for petrol and a full tank can give 500-550kms ride. I had the money for a full payment but the pre-approved loan with 7.7% seemed good enough. I just wanted to let the money compound for another 5 years and not disturb it since it had some good gains in second half of 2021 where I mostly started really investing in my life with investment as goal with most of the money going to my house construction. I also started a SIP of the EMI amount for 5 years in an equity fund that on the same date of EMI deduction. I just want to do a little experiment on if this decision to take a loan made sense. By 2.5 years I would have paid half the loan and rest of the half saved in equity fund that I can sell and pay off the loan. I can just run it for 5 years and see how much I could have just made if I paid the amount in full without a loan and did 2x on the SIP route putting in EMI amount too to see if it made sense. Either way I will write about it in sometime once I reach the midway mark in 2023 to see if the loan was beneficial.

Health and pandemic

2021 had Delta variant in the first half causing a lot of damage and was way worse with Oxygen and hospitalization issues. There was another wave by March-June in India with lockdown and vaccination efforts just starting out. I myself got first dose of Covaxin by May end. The Delta wave coupled with my own medical issues towards Mid June unrelated to the pandemic led me to take a few months to recover back to normal. It also made me reach out to my emergency fund for the first time as backup though insurance covered almost all of it. Something I never anticipated to do but also made me realize the value of emergency fund that I started building around 2020 only.

My family was very much supportive throughout the period including recovery and post hospitalization checkups. The issue was a recurrence of the past and something I hopefully won’t get in future. This also made me realize how unprepared I am in terms of responsibilities in case it turned out to be terminal though luckily it was not. It’s a gut check around how little there is left between today and tomorrow. So there is a dilemma around where if you come across such a situation where there is little time left would you look back and think about all the things you wanted to do and never did for better support of family or would you just go on enjoying life at present now with little less care about family thant the first. It also taught me about striking the balance though imperfect around both enjoying present and making efforts for a better tomorrow too. The whole episode just reminds me of the below passage as I re-read the book during recovery.

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process. - When breath becomes air, Paul Kalanithi

Less code and some upgrades

My code contributions were also less. I was using $5 digital ocean server and ssh-ing into it from my 7 year old 2GB RAM laptop. Post the medical event I finally took the plunge and bought a new HP laptop at 55k. The machine with latest AMD 5000 series processor, 8GB RAM and most importantly an SSD gave me more time to develop locally with better battery backup.

I also upgraded my phone to Samsung Galaxy A52 from my 4 year old Moto G5 Plus with no security updates for past 2 years. The phone became slow to use with normal applications demanding more RAM and space. I published an open source Android application. An app to display the meanings as notification when you select a word from any other app. I finally got some long missing thrill around developing and publishing something. The app received 500+ downloads and I also received it in F-Droid. There are 5-10 daily users and it’s something I can be proud of for the year.

It also gave me a sense of modern application development where I learned more about Kotlin. I also gave Flutter a try making mock designs of UI of popular apps like WhataApp and Zerodha. Flutter also inspired me to try out Jetpack Compose which I very much love given the XML driven nature of UI development in Android. I tried a rewrite of the application in Jetpack Compose. So a lot of fun during my medical recovery as something it is I can focus on and learn along. I also spent the last couple of months fixing Python 3.11 compatibility issues like unittest deprecations that were removed.

Notification Dictionary

  • https://github.com/tirkarthi/NotificationDictionary/
  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xtreak.notificationdictionary

The car was also a notable life upgrade though from a cost perspective it’s a deprecation and a second-hand automatic is hard to find as I mentioned earlier. It was very much helpful during medical issues. It’s also easier to drive as I was not well used to manual gear/clutch coordination and fear of turning the car off despite going to a driving class. It’s a reliable one though not shiny and for an entry level hatchback I guess it’s a good choice. There are aspects like maintenance, mileage that I will learn more about as I drive more but I am somehow an amateur drive after all these years of excuses. As they said the usage goes up once a car comes as I never really thought driving 4000kms in a year though I only take it once a week and never drove anywhere post 50kms at a stretch. Maybe it’s an indication of the fuel prices that crossed a century and the rising inflation along with me being not used to driving much

I wrote almost nothing in the blog this year. I hope to write more tech, life and finance in 2022. So it was a year of less code but with some good upgrades that finally made me to spend something on myself after the health phase as I have been postponing these in the name of frugality.

Conclusion

This wraps up the year for me. It’s a strange year with a lot of sound experience on all parts of life. The pandemic is still on so I am not sure if I will write a similar sentence next year in terms of what it can bring :)

Happy holidays! Stay safe!

Pushes to git and feeds the demanding cat