2020 Update:
Another year has gone by with new set of challenges as well as opportunities put in front of us. I learnt a lot during the year and feel that I have become stronger mentally, financially, physically through this experience.
I have been very fortunate to be a part of this ERE community and having come across Jacob's book and his teachings. While I don't post a lot, I do go through many of your posts that inspire me tremendously and helps me stay on track.
I wish you all a very happy, healthy, fun-filled and fulfilling year ahead!!!
Financial
- Reached savings rate of 58% against target of 60% set for 2020. This was achieved through reduced spending as income remained the same for the year. Of-course COVID helped reduce our travel spending and couple of other discretionary expenses.
- Mid-term (children education fund) and long-term goal (financial freedom target date) are set. Systematic investment plan to reach those goals are on autopilot now. Just need to track those on quarterly and annual basis. These systematic investments are done through Index funds and couple of actively managed funds.
- I still have a long way to go when it comes to generating cash-flow through Active Investment approach. I read couple of books during the year towards this goal like (Trading for a living, Stock market cash-flow, Intelligent Investor, and Thinking Fast and Slow). Plan for 2021 will be to apply those learning in Indian stock market to generate some cash-flow and supplement my income. I have been very inspired by some of forum members (like Lemur) to really deepen my investment skills and practice those to generate income.
- Completed financial planning exercise with a financial planner. Overall feel good about the way my finances are setup now. Life, Health, Home and Auto insurance policies are in order with adequate cover. Account nominations are in place. DW is in sync with how things are setup and more able to manage things in my absence. Still there is a lot of scope for improvement in this area that I need to continue working on.
- Performance of my financial investment in 401k and brokerage account has not been good for the year 2020. I was not expecting the market to recover so fast and kept large chunk of my investment in Cash, Gold and Silver ETF. My REIT investment provided negative return as well.
- I am overall satisfied with what I have achieved on personal finance front during the year.
Health
It has been a mixed bag when it comes my health goals. Started the year with clear measurable goals, and then went off track later in the year for significantly long period. Early part of lock-down was not that bad as we had my nephew was staying with us during lock-down and we (Nephew, my son and I) made it a fun family affair to exercise everyday morning. These were primarily body weight exercises like Squat, Pushup, Plank that we were tracking every day and measuring our progress. This went on for about 3 months (March - June), when each one of us made good progress. And then we fell off track during later part of the year and squandered some of the progress made.
By end of 2020, my weight goal was closely met (reached 64kg instead of 65-68kg set for the year). However my current muscle mass (31.3%) and body fat (25.4%) are far away from the target I had set (12.5% body fat) at start of the year.
One other area of my focus was to find the source of my food allergy. I was partially successful with this goal by doing an Elimination Diet during the year. That exercise ruled out Egg and Wheat/Gluten as source of my allergy. My ability to digest dairy product is still a question mark. Sometimes I feel I am able to digest yogurt and occasional milk based pudding just fine and sometimes I feel otherwise. During 2021, I want to get a better feel for it and redo Elimination diet with that in focus.
We were able to practice much healthier eating throughout the year (less/almost-none restaurant food, more home cooked meal, and healthy meal) as result of pandemic. I learnt to cook many new dishes during the year, and intend to learn even more covering different cuisine (thai, italian) on the healthy side of spectrum.
Spiritual
While I am Hindu by religion and also enjoy many festivities and food linked to our culture, I do not practice any rites or rituals that are specific to this religion. My form of spirituality is mainly meditation and gratefulness practices that I have been learning more about and practicing lately. I went for a 10-day Vipasana meditation retreat later in the year to learn this technique and intend to continue and deepen that practice in coming years. Vipasana meditation is a technique developed based on teachings of Gautama Buddha and is really agnostic of any religion.
Family/Relationship
One of the big plus of work/study from home (due to COVID pandemic) has been the amount of time we had available to spend with family. My daily commute to work got eliminated and we could spend more time with each other. We also had my sister, nephew and nieces stay with us for 3 months during the lock-down. Time spent together during these times have definitely strengthened our relationship.
Work
I am grateful that the company I work for has come out of pandemic stronger. Being in technology space allowed us to work from home without any impact. Company's business prospered too due to more and more customer opting to run their business online. There were no layoffs and salary cuts were kept minimal and only at senior management level. Overall we were able to ride the disruption caused by COVID pandemic well. At personal level I enjoyed the flexibility and less commute time while working from home.