I chanced upon this book “The Automatic Millionaire” by Financial guru David Bach more than ten years ago in a public library near my formal home. This is the one of the first few financial books that I came across and that was also the period of time when I started to get more serious…
Minimising credit cards
I was chatting with a good friend of mine the other day, and she told me that her husband had lost his wallet. Worse thing is, aside from the cash, everything else was inside, the ID card, credit card etc. The first thing I asked was, “I hope you guys have called the banks and…
Jan 2017 -Expenses Update
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…
Budgeting for 2017
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…
Minimising diapers
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…
Priority Seat
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…
Change
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…
The truth about discounted items
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…
Lessons over a year of buying nothing except the essentials
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, 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…