u/ExtraChubbyPikachu

About to be 27M and it’s getting a bit difficult stalling. But I’m not too eager to get into this process.

But, I want to understand, do you put your best foot forward, or do you stay yourself?

Like, physically? Do you try to present yourself differently than what you are at a comfortable baseline?

I’m in a weird situation where people keep thinking I’m a teenager or something like that. The same relatives who used to ask me which college I was studying in 10 years ago, are still asking me what I am studying whenever I meet them today

Just today I had gone to the hospital for a checkup and the doctor was addressing me as if I am a college kid. Was surprised when she learned she was 3 years younger to me. Happens rather often with me for some reason.

Almost always get ID’ed when i try entering a bar.

I guess the straightforward “fix” to it is grooming differently and putting on some more weight as i am on the lower end of the spectrum

But I wonder if it’s actually worth it since I’m already at a comfortable baseline

And my family acts as if they’re not the culprits!!! They act as if they’re they’re not the ones leaking stuff😑

One of my extended family member was trying to sell me an insurance policy with 15 lakh per year premium today. Grilled me for 2 hours over it!!!

How do you deal with stuff like this?

What do you guys snack on that’s free of flavourings, emulsifiers, stabilisers, preservatives and food colours?

I could literally not find anything except plain puffed rice & wheat. The couple things that seem reasonable in ingredients cost the same as their weight in silver📉

Sure there’s fruits. And I eat an unhealthy amount of them. But they’re always sweet or sour and not satiating or have any calories for that matter.

I’ve checkout out all the brands that claim that they’re healthy. But they all contain flavouring, emulsifiers, stabilisers, etc.

I need to eat about 2800-3000 calories a day, and I am barely able to hit 2200-2400 with healthy food.

And that’s after I sprinkle EVOO on basically everything I eat.

Some days I just get some chicken and eat that for a snack. But 250 grams of chicken is only like 450 calories. Sprinkle 15 ml EVOO on that and it is still under 600 cal.

I feel hungry all day everyday. But there’s nothing in the grocery store that’s healthy and high in calories.

Anyone else find it deeply unsettling and weird that there’s a process called AM where your MOM of all people sits with you and makes you go through pictures of women?

Like, not the bio. JUST PICTURES. Like, apparently the bio needs to be procured if I like the pictures. How is it not the other way round?? How is it not procure pictures if you like bio?!

This happened to me for the first time yday. Apparently my “prime years” are about to get over. But I’m still a few of months shy from 27😑

People lurking here thinking of building something online, here are the costs that you would have to bear to get started.

- Domain - 700 rs for a .IN domain
- Mailbox - 2400 for two Google Workspace mailboxes, one for admin and one public facing
- Twilio - 2000 to get started with ph number verification OTPs
- ChatGPT Plus - 2000 per month for coding and other help.

Things that are free upfront but charge on usage:

- Hosting - Vercel. Free to host for a long time. 2500 for upgrade
- Database - Supabase - Free up to 50k users if you optimise usage. 2500 for upgrade
- Cashfree Payment Gateway - 2-2.5% per transaction cost

Things that are free
- Email verification: Google Oauth 2.0. Basically free

Things that you might need to spend on
- Marketing team - unless you can do it yourself
- Legal/Accounting - don’t need to register business if you’re solo.

All in you need to have a bare minimum of 10,000 to survive for a couple months.

You could use cheaper alternatives to what I’ve suggested as your product stack, but cheaper usually means more headache than it’s worth.

How you should price stuff -

Remember, you’re in it to make money off of sales, not build a large customer base or followers on social media

What you need is REVENUE to survive.

So, build products that are worth it for the users to pay a good amount of money.

To make the same 50K in revenue, you either need 50 customers paying 1000 or 500 CUSTOMERS paying 100.

The latter is just not feasible for a solopreneur without a marketing budget.

So make sure what you’re chasing generates enough value for users to pay you enough to run your business.

I’m a few years into my career, and for some time, I’ve been in that phase of career where I’ve started yearning to build something of my own, instead of wasting my life doing a desk job.

I’d admit that watching hundreds of hours of sharktank and other similar content might be gently nudging me to want to build something.

Since 2024, I’ve been trying out various things. Building microsaas products, deal-sharing websites, personal finance products, etc.

Till mid of this year, AI hasn’t been good enough to build stuff end to end.

But now, it’s finally there. It’s more than good enough to build something scaleable to thousands of users from a technical point of view.

But it is proving to be super expensive. Currently I’ve got 2 personal chatgpt subscriptions of 20 dollars each, I am also using my 20 dollar work chatgpt subscription whenever the personal ones are out of limits.

BUT THE LIMITS DONT LAST. My chatgpt WEEKLY limit is done within a SINGLE DAY.

Three subscriptions last me 3 days and have to wait for the next 4 days.

Anyone in a similar situation? How are you managing? Are there any alternative subscriptions that you use that are just as good?

Ive been doing some freelance work and I just got paid the latest biweekly settlement and with this, cumulatively, in the last 5 months I’ve made about 3.8L.

I work from home and most of my expenses are just leisure and fun expenses along with food. I spend about 30K per month. And so my annual expenses are 3.6L.

Feel pretty good about it. BECAUSE now I can spend on the startup I’ve been working on without dipping into my salaried income.

Bought myself a couple of ChatGPT Plus subscriptions and have been working on it like a madman.

Here are some things to keep in mind regarding our income tax system
- Salaried income growth makes sense up to 50LPA. At which poin you enter surcharge bracket @ 34%
- Professional income from Freelancing is taxed @ 17% up to 75LPA
- Business income revenue is taxed at 2% up to 3 Crore revenue

You can make use of all 3 at the same time. Past 20LPA in professional or business income, you need to do GST compliance though.

I’ve got the salaried part sorted. The Freelance I am going to limit to 15L this FY. And am pre-revenue on the business income.

Hoping this year to be fruitful✌🏻

Edit: BTW, if anyone’s using Codex, use 5.6 Luna on High settings. It’s as good as 5.5 and it’s basically free. You will rarely exhaust weekly limits. Sol and Terra are grossly overpriced.

I’ve been sort of living life passively up till now. I’m about to be 27.

What I mean by passive is up till now, almost everything in my life has happened by chance & not because I actively seek it out.

My entire friend circle has formed through inbound connects. Basically people find me sitting in a corner minding my own business and adopt me into their circles.

Past relationship was inbound. It just happened randomly. Lasted a few years

My jobs too have been inbound requests to join their company. Have never really put effort into the jobs too. When they fire me I just join a new one through inbounds.

Family’s well off so they keep handing my out stuff that I need.

I just plan on aimlessly wandering through life. Haven’t faced the need to put in much effort till now.

How difficult is married life going to be for a lazy person?

I had made a post about this a 7 days ago too, and the market’s higher now than then.

We are at the beginning of the next bull run in Indian market. Midcap 150 is at ATH, Smallcap 50 index is at ATH.

It’s not going to be long before Nifty 50, next 50 and smallcap 250 indices follow suit.

If you have been burned during the last 2 years with low returns or negative returns, don’t stop your SIPs just yet.

I expect our markets to rally for the rest of this year.

This is just for SIP investors to not stop SIPs. Not suggesting lumpsums.

Spending about 3.5K a month on meds monthly & about 50K a year on healthcare monitoring tests. So about 1L a year on healthcare.

Since this is a long term thing, so I’ve been thinking why not find cheaper alternatives.

On TrueMeds, whenever you select a medicine, they recommend a substitute. Typically it’s like half the price.

Same formulation & compound but a different, lesser known brand.

Worth trying out?

People in their early 20s, this is a perspective you probably need.

We all like to think that we’re in control over life. That if we do certain things, we would achieve certain long term goals. Be it within your career, finances, relationships, even health

But that’s very far from the truth. The fact is that whether you succeed or not has very less to do with what you do, and a lot more to do with luck.

People label good luck in a variety of ways. “Privilege”, “Nepotism”, “genes”, “god’s grace”, etc etc.

Being born into a well off family, graduating during a hiring boom instead of a bust, having good mentors to guide you, family history of good health, supportive parents, being at the right place at the right time, meeting the right person at the right time, and taking the right decision at the right time.

None of these is in your hand. You could expand the surface area of luck shining on you for some of these, sure, but you there’s still very little probability of any of the good things happening.

Following in the footsteps of successful people doesn’t give you any edge towards success over doing something unconventional on your own. It could be career, trading, investing, business, anything.

We have entire industries fooling you and selling you dreams that if you do certain things, you will succeed in certain things.

Statistically you are more likely to fail than to succeed irrespective of what you do. And that’s perfectly FINE.

If you recognise the role of luck in life, you can be kinder to yourself when things are not going your way in life.

Work hard, keep learning, save & invest, take calculated risk, meet people, and stay fit.

None of these will guarantee you anything. You could still fail in your career, fail in your finances, fail in finding a worthwhile partner, or get struck by lightning.

But, if you get lucky, then the world’s your b*ch.

For the scope of this question, let’s ground it to people making over 50L. Also keep aside the debate about taxes and surcharges and stuff.

Money does buy you the privilege of pushing away your problems. But there’s diminishing returns on that front.

Once you get to that 50L pay range, the momentum’s locked in. Irrespective of whether you put in any additional effort into it or not, your pay will grow. You will be able to comfortably retire within 10-15 years. Your money problem is already sorted.

I’m thinking of this because until a year ago, chasing money was like an addiction to me. Every incremental hike gave a higher high.

But after hitting a certain payscale, I don’t feel those higher highs anymore. Making an additional 50K or 1L is not changing anything in my life

Spending an additional 50K or 1L isn’t changing much in my life either

So, once the money problem is solved, does adding an additional 10-20-30% or even 100% more money as income make you more happier?

And, past a certain range of income, what did you do differently? Where did you shift your focus to?

Midcap and small cap indices are at or near all time high. And there’s no more uncertainties in the macroeconomic scope.

6 months from now, we’ll be deep within another bull market.

Make sure you get into the market before nifty 50 hits ATH.

I have a genuine doubt.

If you invest in a basket of dividend stocks, you can expect the stocks to grow at cagr of 9% and a dividend yeild of 3%.

How I arrived at these number? Nifty dividend opportunities index ETF has given 11.7% Cagr from 2014. Since it has an expense ratio of about 0.3%, I am assuming a 12% is what the price appreciation and dividends have given.

Now, some dividend investors will probably make more returns than this, but give the taxes, transaction costs and other inefficiencies, I doubt people will be making more than 12% CAGR

Most flexicaps have beaten this 12% return in the same time frame.

Investing in mutual funds, and redeeming 2-3% as income is so much more simple and potentially gives more returns and has less costs than dividend investing.

What am I missing?

Just used AI to build myself a calculator to go through all the 6000+ transactions in my tracker and calculate the XIRR across all my investments for the past 6 years

The calculation included the following

1. Investment property purchase - down payment, emis, other related expenses
2. Mutual fund - inflows, redemptions
3. Trading - stock trading, F&O, crypto
4. EPF
5. FD & emergency fund holdings.
6. Gold

Turns out that all the hassle I’ve gone through to do everything for the last 6 years has net me 12.6% XIRR

🤡🤦‍♂️

Idk why I was feeling good about my portfolio. It has underperformed a simple nifty 500 or nifty multicap index fund.

All the headaches with leverage for real estate investment, all the headache with trading, all late nights spent constructing the perfect basket of funds. All of it was probably a waste of time.

Unfortunately I can’t share my calculator as it is purpose build to work with my data model.

If you’re savvy with AI, try doing this analysis on your portfolio. Just looking at the mutual fund or stock portfolio xirr is deceptive as it doesn’t have all your money in it.

Over the past 2 years I had lost 10-11 Kg (25 lb). I got diagnosed with UC about 3-4 weeks ago, and I’ve been on mesalamine since.

I am currently completely symptom free for about a week. And I want to try and gain those 10Kg back over the next year.

I’ve been trying to eat as much as possible for the past month, have been using IBD weight gain supplements, and have stopped all my work out to burn less calories.

I see absolutely no improvement in the weight department. And I am also not able to increase my food intake any further.

I am currently about 57Kg (125 lb). It doesn’t help looking like a skinny teen while being 27 yo.

How to gain weight without causing flares?

Semiconductor companies are crashing. Samsung, SK hynix, Micron, Sandisk, and even Nvidia.

On the other hand. Yesterday we saw beaten down SAAS companies rising.

IMO, the next crash will be in AI labs. Spacex stock is already pricing XAI at 0.

It will be an amazing thing to witness over the next few months.

Don’t start overseas investments if you currently don’t have any.

I got diagnosed with moderate pan-UC about 17 days ago. I’ve started with 3.6g oral mesalamine for the first 2 weeks and 2.4g for the past 3 days.

I have been dealing with symptoms for about 3 years now.

For the last 4 days, the pain is gone, and other visibile symptoms are gone. I feel much more energetic than before.

I’m able to step outside my home for the whole day without worrying about needing to use the restroom.

Is this characteristic of a remission? I do plan on getting calprotectin tested after next 14 days

But, is this too early to celebrate? I’ve been on a strict diet of bland, tasteless food for almost a month now. Started even before the diagnosis.

I’ve been craving decent food, snacking, etc, but I am terrified of eating something that might trigger it again.