“One Kg tamarind is Rs. 69? What the heck…! Has it always been this costly?” raced my mind through the grocery stand in the neighbourhood supermarket. “Lets buy this 2kg surf excel no? we get a bucket free” urged my wife. I mused for a while trying to keep me afloat in the fmcg quicksand and told her, “honey, we would be in a different country even before we finish a kilo of it, and neither we need the damn bucket”
Singular direction of the bachelor life seemed to continue despite the marriage few weeks ago. We havent changed much except the money part. Suddenly this incessant financial cautiousness developed in us, I think half it could be attributed to all those relatives urging us to buy a house, car, space shuttle, cow herd and what not. For a while we felt like saving up for all those, then we woke up in the rented apartment on the owners bed and realized that we may not ever need a own house in the next dozen or so years. “until the retirement” my brain echoed.
Despite all the b-school learnings and associated trappings I still feel crippled when it comes to one single financial goal I have set for myself. “Retire before 45” Duh! my near negative financial knowledge shows that I need at least 3 crores when I am 45 to do that. What was the “KBC phone number again?”
But seriously, retiring at 45 with a neat house in a corner of the country minus cow herd and space shuttle is pretty much doable, thanks to my mightier than thou IIM brand and growing economy.
Otherwise, life seems pretty much same as it was before. Just that Madhu, my PC has conked off with some major illnesses, 12 of motherboard capacitors are blown off, Monitor controller or some such thing has bombed and one of those tiny little 128mb SDRAM cards had an early demise leaving me poorer by few thousands. All that resulted in no improvements though, the comp is almost done for. I could see it in the now always open CPU. I am planning to bid farewell to this 6 year old juggernaut which has ran movie servers, counterstrike servers, web servers, countless such crap through thick and thin of my so called academic life and never helped me in working from home after that. Goodbye old boy!
