Kate recently published a post chronicling how we have decided to set a budget of $60,000 for our 2017 expenses. This excludes mortgage (we did not include mortgage as these are deducted from our CPF ). Expenditure levels differ with each household but we came up with this ballpark figure after roughly calculating some initial…
Justin from Root of Good recently published an article on how his family of 5 managed to live for under US$40,000 a year. Dave and I are followers of his blog and needless to say, we were extremely impressed on how they managed to achieve this, despite the fact that they have 3 kids (yes…
I chuckled as I was typing the heading. Isn’t this an oxymoron? If we could minimise the use of diapers, we would, won’t we? Regardless of adults or babies. Since Ally was born, other than her formula milk powder, the other thing that we probably spent more of is on her diapers. (Never mind that she’s…
I was taking the subway home from work the other day and since it was rush hour, it was rather crowded. Needless to say, there were no seats available. Not that I needed one thought, since I was feeling perfectly fine, ain’t pregnant and I kind of wanted to stand to stretch my legs having…
The other day on the subway, Dave shared a certain quote with me that goes… “You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you“. It took me about 10 seconds before I finally realised the meaning of that quote. You can’t change the people around you. Who are…
Over the last couple of weeks, we have witnessed numerous mega sale events by various retailers, both online and brick and mortar stores. Remember Black Friday, and then there was that Christmas sales, and post-Christmas sales? And now, Chinese New Year sales… These sales just seem endless. Well in hindsight, sales seem to be the…
Finally, the year 2016 draws to a close and it also means the end of my one year shopping ban which started in Jan 2016. I planned to experiment on spending nothing on personal stuff except the essentials and see if i could resist the temptation to buy stuff unnecessarily. Through this experiment, i found out…
Let it go, let it go! Can’t hold it back any more. Let it go, let it go! Turn away and slam the door. I don’t care what they’re going to say. Let the storm rage on. The cold never bothered me anyway If the above verse does seem familiar, it is an excerpt of…
We started on this blog somewhere in September 2016 and we managed to garner quite a bit of followers since then (we are currently top of the list in Google search if you type in “minimalist in the city” which we think is quite an achievement as our blog is relatively new). As for the…
In a previous post, “How much do you need to retire” , i concluded that the key component to that question lies in your expenses and that will determine how far are you away from reaching financial independence. In a separate post, “Knowing your real hourly wage”, we also discussed our “real hourly wage”, where work related expenses are…