Happy new year to everyone reading the blog and everyone’s who’s not reading.

As some of you might have read in my previous blog post this is going to be the year of spending. To discover what I like. To try out some hobbies. This is the year I want to watch less of Netflix and instead create something. It could be a pottery. It could be a wine. It could be a podcast.

Creation requires money and mind space. Most of my last few years went in worrying about not making enough and trying to save every penny that I could. Don’t get me wrong, there’s fun in being frugal.

Anyhow, coming back to the point of this blog post. Here are the top things I want to do this year.

Short Domestic Travels

As I write this, it feels weird to have my first goal of 2022 set to be more travels. There’s a new surge of the variant and it almost feels like we might get into yet another lockdown. Third in three years. I really hope we don’t get into that stage, specifically because a lot of people moved from middle class to poverty levels in the last two lockdown. On personal front it’s been a difficult situation for many.

However, if the situation doesn’t deteriorate further, I’d like to make at least three short trips nearby. The exciting thing is that I haven’t traveled a whole lot in the state I’ve moved to. So there are a tons of places that I can visit where I don’t have to splurge a lot and yet can travel and explore cultures.

Experiment Further with Wine

I started experimenting with Home wine brewing since last year. I made my first 1ltr batch and it has turned out to be quite good. I’d like to add more flavours to my wine and I’m planning to experiment adding some spices. As an Indian, it’s against my culture to not use spices in anything 😂 I’ll of course report here on any mishaps if any. Last year I spent around INR 2000 in getting all the equipments I’ll need for brewing wine. To go further from here, I won’t have to do any further hefty investment. I’m still planning on buying one more glass fermenter can though as it will make my life easier.

Try out Pottery & Canvas painting

During the first lockdown, I felt a bit lost. Like everyone else. I scourged into tiny house living, building community, van-life, woodworking, potter among others. I’m embarrassed to mention the number of hours I’ve spent watching YouTube videos on these topics. They’ve been entertaining and they helped me cope. However out of all those topics I’d like to try out Pottery and Canvas painting.

All my life I’ve not been the one who has any creative bone. I took that as a badge of honor for most of my life. I’ve changed my mind on it. I now think all my life I’ve been lazy. I didn’t want to experiment. Possibly out of fear of failure. The last few years where I knowingly went to do things that many would say would fail has given me the confidence that it’s okay to fail. All you need to do when you fail is not give up, get up and try again not repeating the same mistakes again. With that in mind, I got into wine brewing. With that in mind, I want to try out canvas painting and pottery. Maybe I’ll discover that I don’t like either of it. Maybe I’ll discover that I don’t like one of them. Maybe I’ll discover I like doing both of them. And that’s fine.

I’m allocation INR 7000 for both of these hobbies.

Cycle 400kms

The new city that I’ve moved to has a much suitable weather for cycling than my previous city. There used to be a time when I’d cycle 20-30kms every single day. I hope to get back in the groove. My health has deteriorated quite a bit since then though. I already own a cycle and don’t plan to invest any further on cycling expect getting a new helmet as I forgot to ship my old one.

Get back to Swing Trading

Last year I wanted to learn trading. In fact since 2020 I’ve spent a significant amount of time learning trading. I’ve learnt how to read technical charts for swing trading. Even tried out few strategies in options buying. Tried intraday. Given that I have a full time job, intraday and options trading is just not feasible. The slowest way to do trading that fits my time availability is swing trading. I can spend time on weekends reading charts and create strategy.

Back in September 2020, I started with the stock market experiment where I started my trading journey with few thousands of INR. And I used to buy Nasdaq 100 fund from the profit. The idea was to become consistent and to do that I’d set a target of 1L to this fund. Needless to say I lost track of it and have still not achieved my target. In fact I got so lost that I started adding profits to multiple funds when I made more than my monthly targets. And everything fizzled out when got a new job and couldn’t work on trading. Due to the new RBI rule, my broker even sent back the amount that was lying with them.

I’ve decided to start again with a capital of 25k INR and get into swing trading exclusively.

Angel investment in a startup

I’ve been in the startup ecosystem since ages. I’ve built really good connections and now that I’ve achieved CoastFi, it’s high time I do some riskier investments. Now some would say that I already have riskier investments with crypto. However, I feel that if I lose all the amount in crypto and the amount that I’ve set aside for startup investment, I’ll still be okay. I won’t even lose the badge of honor bestowed upon me the gods of CoastFi. What else is there to fear?

Overall the theme of 2022 seems like I intentionally want to do things that will fail. And that’s fine 🙂