Phew! It’s been a long ride and took much more than expected but the construction work in my new apartment is finally done.

I started the construction work back in April after much hesitation. Just one week after we started work the city went under strict lockdown. Little did we know we’d be marred with second wave. Things have been really bad in multiple cities due to inadequate health care. While news are reporting on cities but we don’t know how smaller cities and villages even are faring. My city has even announced plan for third wave and we don’t have enough vaccines. While we are preparing for third wave, the city is also bring unlocked slowly. I don’t blame the politicians here. If they don’t open up the city with no support from the government it’s really tough on the working class population. So that’s that.

Anyhow, the city opening up means that the one last final piece that’s remaining will be done soon. My contractor has sent me videos and we just have a paint job remaining. It’s really one day of work.

My super amazing broker in the mean time also got a couple of offers on rent. Some were really low ball offers. She called the other day with an offer for INR 22k in rent. There were a few for 24k and even 25k. However, since we were in strict lockdown nothing really went anywhere. I’m expecting to rent out the apartment for at least INR 25K Per month.

In the meantime, I’ve already started paying extra on my mortgage payments. My family and friends say that I’m stupid but I’m only putting in amount I’m saving since I have no real expenses these days. My plan is to pour in the rent to make extra payments once I’ve rented it out. Although I’ve lived with mortgage payments for the last 4 years now I’d like to clear this off as soon as possible. I haven’t reduced or even increased my sip in my index funds this year even though my income has gone up. Earlier, I wanted to pour in my incentives into my mortgage but I’ve decided against it and am instead investing it in my index funds instead.

Mortgage remaining

I paid some extra amount in the month of May as I ended up saving a lot unknowingly 😉 May was also the month that I didn’t have any large expenses. I’d certainly like more such months.

Months	2021
Jan	0
Feb	0
March	56145
April	56145
May	111145
June	56145
July
August
September
October
November
December
Total	279580

Mortgage remaining is INR 70,57,000.

Ugh.

While not being able to put up the apartment on rent hasn’t really hurt me, I’d like to make more payments on mortgage. Just imagine paying at least 80k per month instead of 56k. Dreams. Can’t complain though considering that I’m in a position to make the minimum payments without hurting my budget.

The last few months have mostly been about the apartment on this blog. However, I’ve also maxed my PPF, purchased more Sovereign Gold Bond, and paid variety of insurances (adulting is tough). A friend has convinced to start adding to NPS too given my income. His argument makes sense and it’s only INR 50k per year. So I might end up adding it. If you aren’t in the highest tax bracket and do not have extra cash, I’d not recommend NPS. You can read about it in my 2018 blogpost.

I’ve started adding to my base amount for the stock market series. I added 5k in the month of May and another 5k in the month of June. This means I’ve I’ve gone from INR 130k to 140k that I can gamble with 😜. It’s still an amount that I’m comfortable losing. You can read about my stock market experiment here.

I don’t quite remember when I updated the amount (on this blog) I managed to put into Nasdaq 100 but I’m half way through my goal of INR 1L. While that was the bigger goal, I usually convert bigger goals into smaller ones. I was planning to add 4k INR a month and I’m at a stage where I’m crossing 4k a month from stocks. This series is going slow but that’s intentional since I don’t want to spend most of my time looking at stonks.

Barista FI

Back in April, after reading Scott Trench’s book, I updated my spreadsheet to include The Real Networth. This also means that my BaristaFI amount has moved forward.

April 2021: INR -30,59,460
June 2021: INR -20,63,716

The huge difference is because I had a calculation error back in April. Getting my incentives also helped though. So the huge progress is due to part calculation error and part incentives. I’m too lazy to rectify the error and recalculate it. Instead, I’ve added a comment in my spreadsheet. Someday I might go and correct it. I do not include my crypto investments in calculating these numbers.