how much money is enough?

well for starters, this is not a philosophical discussion. I was thinking from the lines of folks who are working in the US because of the fact that the USD is 40x of the INR and are thinking of going back when they are “financially strong”.

So it starts off with what are the expenses on a monthly basis in India. Can a family survive with Rs 40K per month? There are some many factors (rent costs vary a lot, #family members vary, lifestyles vary). But here are some numbers:

Rent / Mortgage 12500
Groceries 4000
Electricity 2500
Telephone Bill 1500
Mobile Bills 2500
Movies, Eat Outs 4000
Weddings, bday gifts 2500
Vacation 5000
Medical Expenses 7000
Petrol 5000
health Insurance,
medical costs 5000
Internet 1000
Maid 2000
Water 1000
Paper, Milk 1000
Car EMI 3000

47000

Now the question, how much savings do you need and how should you invest to get a monthly return that satisfies the above? technically that leads to financial independence.

stay posted and let me know if I am missing something huge (kids, school expenses,…..)

to wire or not to wire

The dollar is at 39.5 right now. apparently, the rupee is said to gain some more in the next few months. So the question is should we wire $$$ to India right now and how?

well, I did wire a few 1000s yesterday because of need in India. So the basic question is what do you plan to do with the wired $$$? for starters, the interest rates in India are at 9.5% for rupees, stock market in general is doing well and there are smart investments that you can do. if you plan to do any of this, well than converting at 39.5 or 43.5 may not be a biggie again assuming that it is a few 1000s. and more importantly if there is an important need, then all these reasons are not a factor at all.

How to transfer? a friend of mine (BK) had done enough research a couple of years back and come up with a recommendation which i follow. it seems like SBI does a good job in getting the maximum conversion buck. so the best thing is to wire money in $ to a SBI NRE account, which means that the conversion to rupees happens in India. Sometimes, you might be able to negotiate the bank to give the best rate over a period of 3-4 days. depending on how much you transfer, the wiring fee ($42) will still not make a difference

happy wiring and happy investing.

its been a while

its has been a  while since I posted… have some travel scheduled for the next couple of weeks. So I want to get some posts out – hope to get some thoughts out this week. 

yuvraj settles score!

wow, 6 sixes in an over, a difficult feat in any form of the game. most have been pretty thrilling to watch. I read some reports on how flintoff ticked off yuvraj and yuraj wanting to settling scores with the beating he got (5 sixes in an over a few weeks back).

Ah! a great feeling to answer back with his bat. But now that he has settled scores, hope things dont get back to ‘usual’ and he continues to blast his way. kudos

i just graduated, what next?

Ah, the question pops up repeatedly, maybe in a different form, in several stages of your career. During the initial stages, “i just graduated high school”, now which college should I apply for and which field. A few years back, when I run into elderly folks in events (such as marriages), there were questions such as “Yenna pa, computer field is flooded, economy is the US is slowing down, what do you suggest my grandson should ‘take’ in his BE degree, bio medical?”. It is a big decision time – especially in an Indian education system which is rigid once you pick your line, eg: a person starting off interested in economics will find it extremely difficult (close to impossible) to become an engineer. So you start off with picking up a field that people around you suggest (that NRI uncle who made it big, for example, will be your mentor and guide ).

Then the completion of the bachelors degree, what to do next – is it going to be getting a job, doing your MBA or enrolling for the MS. Then you wade through this degree figuring out your area of expertise which you will settle on.

Then you complete your post graduation, and start your job search. You will be told ‘it is time that you settle down by getting a job’. You take this statement to heart and decide that you have reached the end of the mad race and now magically things will settle down. No, my young friend, the race has just begun. There is no settling down in the real world, it is a constant change that you will need to catch up. I don’t want to scare ya – it is not a unmanageable mad race as well. The reality is you have to embrace change – so be mentally prepared. as C K Prahlad quotes, every change is an opportunity. if it is the right one and you are among the first ones, you will do well.

Some of the guys are really good in the big picture, they know their field of interest right away and hence are working towards it right from their bachelors. I had a few friends who were that type – always wanted to be the top few in that category and were towards it. Most of us are in the latter category trying to figure out and that is ok – as long as we are striving to be the best in whatever we undertake.

So for those of you who have “graduated” (which could be from high school, bachelors, MS, have been working for 3 years, been an employee for ’n’ years), understand more of your domain by talking to folks who have done this before. For example, if you are done with your MS and are looking for a job, understand the companies in your field of interest, read up on the latest technologies, prepare well for the interview process and make sure you reach out to all the companies out there. Compile all the advice, filter the ones that don’t make sense to up and make your own decision – you will have folks asking you to start a company right away, some others who will ask you to go the ’safe’ path. You need to figure out what you can make happen – there is no right and wrong advice, but things will go wrong in the implementation.

If you need pointers, send me a note. I have a great friends network to lean on – if I cannot give you pointers, can point you to some folks that will help.

Kick the dust off your resume` and start moving forward

why do people succeed?

Is it because they have the right connections? Did they study from the best institutions? Is it simply because they are significantly rich and have enough cash to take them through ? Is sheer hard work the magic mantra? Or is it just luck? does it require supreme confidence? is it just being in the right place at the right time?

I think people succeed because they want to – they want to accomplish something really bad. their lives are incomplete if they dont make “it” happen. they cannot sleep if “it” is just not done. That is passion, folks. All the factors above are required in some form or the other to make “it’ happen but in isolation are useless.

It is just amazing how a great team sets out to change the world, completely believing in the vision and more importantly in one another and with unrelentless persistence make “it” happen. Time and again, this happens.

Time to seek out that one thing that keeps you awake at night, without accomplishing it life seems incomplete and get to execute it.  Go seek and fulfill that single thing that you define as success. if you cant, no one can.

fantasy football’s desi twin

interesting, an online league system built for the cricket junta -
http://cricketselector.com/

this was suggested by my wife the other day and I shot it down by saying that cricket does not have as much variety from positions and scoring perspective to make it as interesting as fantasy football. Voila, here is a website attempting at that. Let us see how people take to it.

good read – Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

I am reading this book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days and have just read a few of the chapters and find it really interesting. Some great learnings from the folks who have made it big. very inspirational and helps one believe that it can be done

Most of the interviews follow this line:

* Getting started.
* Interactions with VCs.
* Some of the more intense moments.
* Turning Points.
* Things that were surprising.
* Felt like quiting at any time ?
* Advice for people looking to start a startup.
(taken from a customer review on Amazon)

if you get a chance, read it.

get real, estate

You probably have heard this over and over again – real estate is the best investment, to make it big, etc, etc. In many ways, this is true, if you look at the US taxation system, it allows $250,000 of capital gain with no taxes to pay – that is a big plus when compared to something like stocks. In the case of stocks, the short term gain is pretty steep (around 30%) and the long term at best can be around 15%.

Had I invested in real estate in 2001, the returns could have been really good. hindsight is 20-20. The fear of losing jobs, lot of instability was happening in 2001, maybe I did play on the side of caution. moving forward, today real estate is ’slowing’ down, not many buyers, prices stabilizing and dropping at times. some factors for people to consider:
- understand the costs in closing a real estate deal (the closing costs, escrow commisions, etc)
- if you are starting off your career or plan to be in the same place for 3-5 yrs, maybe it is still a good idea to re-consider real estate as an option. Imaging getting a property for 350K 3 BD town home (hey cal guys, this is still possible in the NW if you move a good 30 miles away from Redmond).
Let us say that mortgage rates are 6.5% => 22.75 K interest every year. With the interests tax deductible, approximately 25% can be recovered. so this will end up to be 22.75 * 0.75 = 17.0625K per year. Let us say, the principle paid is about 1K. That would translate to about 18K per year or $1500 per month for a 3BD apt which is not too bad.
If you are single and in a position to have 2 roomies, this simple translates to $500 per month and building equity.

So get real, estate is still an option in the US.

Now, look at what has happened in India, in the last 5 yrs. Returns of 2x, 5x, 10x has been unbelievable. Places like Sriperumbudur in chennai, magarpatai in Pune, etc have skyrocketed. Certain properties in Hyderabad and Bangalore are going at $750,000. Capital gains in real estate if re-invested within 3 months in another property apparently has no tax implications. but it has now beyond range. So it begs the question, should we invest in India at all?

I think the smarter investment is to move to tier2 cities like coimbatore for residential which seem to be the next logical point to increase. from a commerical venture perspective maybe places like OMR (renting an apt on a corporate lease is also a good option which I look as this one). But in India, getting a real estate is an issue – you can end up buying a piece of land which is already owned by a couple of folks

Last I heard was that prices are stabilizing in chennai ciy as well. As the properties going at 1C, 3C are slowly coming down. So it may still be a good time to invest as a joint venture with a bunch of friends getting into a commercial venture – a 3000 sq ft showroom.

Interested? Send me a note …..

technology – blog with no voice = idli with no sambar

Ok fine, I had the title coined this way to bring in more visitors .

but seriously, I think the blog thingy needs a lot of ramping. I am new to this – so point me to any tools outside if I am missing anything. let me actuall step back, even before the voice feature. whats up with the comments stuff? I write a 200 line blog sectioned into 5 paras, 4 folks read it and write up comments on para3, para4 and para5.

why does the consolidated comments appears serially? Why cant blog sites give us tools that can inject the comments at the specific sections – like the comments section in Microsoft Office. Seriously, this makes sense. Now if someone gets this consolidated view, he can read all the comments in the correct context. I think this is super user experience. This creates an illusion for the end user to have been in a live conversation session and listening to various aspects at one shot.

Now let us get to voice – man, I need to use smiliies, “uh oh”, “duh”, “hmm”, etc to enable expressions. Text has no expressions, no tone , no emotions and thats why we need voice people. Take the traditional world for example, we see Jay Leno’s show not only for content but for his style of presentation. I think blogging has the potential to take it there but lacks it today. Now someone is going to say ‘text editing is easy but what if I want to make changes to my voice comment’. well I have 2 things – one, you cannot make changes to what you say in a live conversation and a voice blog feature is enabling it. two, fine agreed, can we allow folks to inject smaller audio expressions within a blog text. Now the browser can play it for you  it starts displaying the text in a order and then you hear the audio expression wherever it is apt.

I agree folks have gotten used to adapting to the ‘only text’ aspects of the web – search, email, blog. but the future is voice and video. Things are changing rapidly. With TellMe integration, I am hoping that search will become audio search. the implementation does have interesting aspects – will the backend be simply text and the search query is translated to text or the backend text is enriched and augmeneted with voice tags and then searched or the backend is a audio database of wave files. The parser will simply strip open the backend wave files and search within them. Well ya the last option seems a stretch. but come one, who would have thought that you can have a page format, write it to disk, implement a buffer manager in memory, search for things in memory using bufsearch() (i see my SY buddies smiling) and searching through the page for a audio pattern data match. well if this was 2000, I would ahve some funding – well this is as good as WebVan for sure.

but again, if you are a media systems person, I will intereted in hearing from you. your thoughts on why this is fundamentally not possible. Can we invent a new audio format that allows this? metadata for patterns. then building a database engine with a buffer manager and access manager and a query engine on top – voila, hear comes the audio search engine.

Ok , let me stop now and give you folks to “text blog” your comments. as for me, i will enjoy my idli, sambhar and chutney.