Blissful Life

When you apply skepticism and care in equal amounts, you get bliss.

Month: November 2022

  • Money Matters

    Warning: This post discusses money. Like, it’s going to talk about my account balance. Now, for some of the people reading this, their account balance might be much lower than mine. And for others, vice versa. So, if you don’t want to compare lives, you’re better off not reading this.

    ***

    Like I said when I was interviewing Shreyas for IBComputing, I don’t believe that we should wait till we grow old to write about the strategies we use to live our lives. The main reason is that what we do today is probably going to get outdated in a couple of years and therefore writing/talking about it 20 years from now is not going to help anyone.

    A few years ago I saw a blog post by Michael Lynch, who had quit job at Google and started out as a solo developer. In that post, M discusses how much money M was making – profit, loss, revenue, everything. M made another post after a year, and another, and another. These annual posts talking about finances were very inspiring to see.

    I am also attempting something like that here. For the sake of completeness, in this post I will do a recap of what’s been happening to my bank accounts till now.

    ***

    Privilege.

    Like I hinted in the warning, each life is different. Someone who has more expenses than I have might not be able to save as much money as I can. Someone who started out with a tougher deal might not be able to make as much money as I can. And vice versa. The purpose of this post is not to tell people that they can follow what I did and make money. Neither do I think that I’m making more money than everyone else. This is not a self-help/advice/moral blog post. This is simply about making my financial life transparent.

    ***

    The first salary I have gotten came from the compulsory internship I did as part of MBBS course at Mysore Medical College. Till then it was only my family putting money in my pocket and bank account to pay hostel fees, eat food, etc.

    So, from 2016 March to 2017 March I was making about ₹20,000 (if my memory serves me right) monthly. When I started earning my dad stopped putting money into my account. So, it was only when I went home my grandmother giving me 5k-10k once in 4 months or so that was my additional income.

    At the end of this internship, I vaguely remember having around ₹1,40,000 in my account.

    March 2017: ~₹1,40,000

    ***

    Then I joined SVYM as a resident medical officer. The rural economy of Saraguru combined with the cheap food and accommodation there meant that I could save almost all of the ₹35,000 I was getting as salary there.

    In the last few months of working there, I was also moonlighting (remotely) in a Bengauluru start-up in an engineering role. I was being paid hourly there.

    In August 2018 I left SVYM and moved to Bengaluru. This is when I started tracking my financial situation seriously. And therefore, from here on I have very good numbers.

    August 2018: ₹4,47,613.61

    ***

    The first house Swathi and I lived in was in Mathikere in Bengaluru. We paid ₹10,000 rent per month. We did have a splitwise group between us that we maintained quite well in those times. (Nowadays we only put large numbers, like house rent, in that splitwise group). We used to eat outside a lot (lots of Kerala restaurants near Ramiah hospital). Traveling was mostly by metro and BMTC buses. Sometimes Uber.

    I have a simple way of tracking money that doesn’t take my time regularly, and can be done whenever I have time. I keep a google sheet titled Vitamin M (see picture)

    The first column is date. Then there are columns for each bank account I have. Then a column for cash in hand. Another for money I’m owed. A couple of columns for totals (one is total liquid cash, the other is total virtual worth (liquid + owed)). I also kept a column to track the difference between the total at any moment and the money I had when I first came to Bangalore.

    There is no rule on when to update this sheet. I used to update it whenever I had a chance, I remembered, or I felt like I wanted my life in order. The procedure to update is also simple. I enter the date. I login to all bank websites and enter the current balance. Then I count the money in my wallet. Then I open splitwise and other trackers to see how much money people owe me. And the rest of the calculations is done by formulae.

    If you can see the picture, you’ll notice that from August 2018 (when I moved to Bangalore) till the end of 2019, my balance was always below the baseline (of 4.5 lakh). But it was also not going too far below. Basically, I was making almost as much money as I was spending in the initial year of being in Bangalore. This was through working as a doctor and also as a developer.

    Around August of 2019 we had moved to a house in Kadiranapalaya which is equidistant from Indiranagar metro, Halasuru metro, and Swami Vivekananda metro. The rent here was ₹14,000. And the living costs were also slightly higher than Mathikere. The startups I was working with were all struggling to pay at that time and by around October 2019, I had dipped to ~₹3,20,000.

    But towards the end of that year I started working with a non-profit as a software developer and that’s how I first crossed the baseline after coming to Bangalore.

    October 2019: ~₹3,20,000

    ***

    As unfair as it is, as I was making more money, more projects were coming to me with even more money attached. I was an investigator in a public health intervention/research study. I was seeing patients. I was developing software for various people. I was getting paid for workshops I facilitated.

    By April 2021, my worth was about ₹10,00,000. I was a millionaire in Indian rupees. And remember all of this was when the world was burning with COVID.

    April 2021: ₹10,00,000

    ***

    About time the second wave of COVID hit I was getting disillusioned by the things I were doing. I quit almost all paid work and sat at home.

    My calculation was that at the rate I was burning money, I could easily float for 3 years, or even 5 years if I tried. So I was under no pressure to make more money. 

    I did various things from around May 2021 to May 2022. Lots of different experiences. I stretched myself in all possible directions and figured out my limits and possibilities.

    May 2022: ~₹7,50,000

    ***

    In June 2022 at the compulsion of my friend I started another paid, part time role as a software developer at Kinara Capital. Coincidentally on the day I joined there I also took up the responsibility of leading an archival effort through SOCHARA who also decided to pay me against my wishes. And many tiny projects/workshops as earlier still keep coming.

    While I’m writing this, I updated the Vitamin M sheet. And it tells me that I’m a millionaire again.

    November 2022: ₹10,78,646.30

    ***

    Addendum: It is not just Michael Lynch who has inspired this post. The financial life of Pirate Praveen is also public information because Praveen has disclosed it as a candidate in many elections. Between those and the financial reports of various non-profits, I do not see any reason why I shouldn’t be writing this blog post.

    I’m also the director of an LLP and I assure you that the numbers in that bank account changes nothing in this analysis. If you know what I mean.

  • By Doing “Government’s Work”, Are We Making It Easier for The Government and Worse for the People?

    At the end of the CHLP session today Akshay (not me) asked something like: “When we do work that the government should be doing, are we making it easier for the government in some ways, and also making it more difficult to hold the government accountable?”

    This is a question that only someone who is truly invested in community work can ask. They are worried that the government is going to invest less in that particular problem, that in the long run it becomes harder and complicated because of the reliance on “bespoke” solutions. (The example given was how government relies on the voluntary effort of data by covid19india.org / covid19bharat.org to get COVID related counts and how there is no other system to track these counts)

    I do not claim enough experience to answer this question.

    But if we break down this question, the concerns we have are:

    1. How sustainable are such bespoke solutions? If we could keep doing it forever, then why should we not do it forever? Should government ever take over?
    2. Are such bespoke solutions less effective than more universal solutions? If yes, are we causing a less than optimal outcome? If no, are we preventing a scale-up of these solutions by the mere fact that it came from outside the government?
    3. Does access to and/or existence of such bespoke solutions make it difficult to demand more universal solutions from the government? (Either by making people reticent or by making the demand look less urgent)

    A few counter points are:

    1. But how long should I wait for the government to do the right thing?
    2. Who is at the receiving end of our desire to wait for a universal solution? Who suffers when we wait?
    3. Let’s say I don’t attempt the bespoke solution. What do I do now? Should I now force the government to build a solution?

    The way I avoid these questions are by thinking:

    • The government is a huge, inefficient, highly hierarchical organization with not much capability to build innovative solutions. Therefore, expecting government to come up with a good solution is pointless.
    • I should do things that give me joy, not what brings joy to the world. If bringing joy to the world in certain ways brings me joy, then so be it.
    • The second-order, third-order effects of our actions are very very hard to predict. No matter how much we “calculate”, not much is going to come out of the calculations. We have no way to say that any particular action is what is going to help the world. We just do what we want to do and hope that it turns out to be a good thing. Often, there is no way to actually say whether something turned out to be good either.
    • If we are creating value, putting value out into the world, it is more likely than not that we’re doing something right. The value will compound in ways we cannot anticipate. Always.

     If you are reading this and you have answers to some of these (existential, sorta) questions, let me know.

    Update

    I sent this to Tanya and Prashanth. Prashanth tried to add a comment and failed. That comment is:

    “This is an important question to “struggle” with especially for those
    (like me) who are involved in such “solutions” that are often not only
    outside-the-box, but also as rightly pointed out, being designed outside
    the “public” system. For an individual like me for whom, working with
    indiviudals/communities/populations is coming from an ethical
    imperative and from wishing to move our society towards health equity,
    there is – I confess – no other way. What do we who do not wish to work
    within governments for various reasons do? I think what we can do is
    build coalitions, networks and allies which nudge/push/critically
    demonstrate the need for public services and systems to do more. And for
    me, such efforts are ways of showing that more can be done. Another
    reason to do this is to address the inertia that sometimes develops at
    middle level institutions (like districts) where the glamour of
    word/jargon based policy vocabulary is not there and the fatigue of
    under-resourcedness is a daily reality. So, I believe such efforts can
    hopefully spur creative thinking within public systems, build allies
    within the system and who knows…knowing the complexity and unintended
    effects these things have…some things stick…some things
    flourish…improve? But, certainly there ought not to be a claim that
    such accomplishments (if they are such) will automatically result in
    “systems change”….these are some of my thoughts. “

     

    Prashanth also got Werner Soors involved. You can read W’s comment below this post. To me, W has more or less arrived at the crux of the dilemma. The struggle is related to the dichotomy created by the ideal government and the real government. But as W points out, it maybe worth trying to become part of the government through becoming part of the people.

    Coincidentally, I saw this video by The Ugly Indian today