Simple Budget, Simple Life

I confess I seem to lose the ability to write. I practically use co-pilot to rephrase my emails through my broken English. And here I am, trying to make an effort to write, but feeling stucked. I am alone at home, enjoying my quiet time, while R&B music is playing in the background. Chinese R&B music to be specific. I realised there are so many nice songs by China songwriters and composers now - their names unfamiliar to me, but their melodies and lyrics touched my heart. It brought back sweet childhood crushes and memories.  I also realised I am now old and at another stage of life where these love stories are past tenses. It is a bittersweet realisation that time has gone just like that. When I wished I could grow up faster, where I wonder how I'd be like when I'm in my late 20s, 30s, I'm now living it. Life has been good so far. I am not trying to force my contentment, but I must pat my back and thank God for giving me a comfortable life.  For the past few months...

31 January 2026. End of 1st month in 2026. I'm proud of myself for trying - trying to fill my life with more new activities.   I felt I've been cruising along, and "wasting" my time for years since covid. Events in my life has made me weak. I lost hp, but took potions along the way to grow it back, and I accumulated more xp and levelled up.  I am now learning to add more sparkles into my calendar.  In this month, I went for health screening, went for makeup class (which was more of a product pushing/mlm sales pitch), started seeing a woman's health physiotherapist to improve my body, attended workshop on investing, went for a community tour, went for a church tour, and now - hoping to learn crocheting. All in attempt to be less idle, learn something new, and tell myself - my job is not my identity. Internalising this idea is still a work in progress. I guess because I've not much going on in life (which I remain thankful that things have been smooth for me), I...

As I started to type, the first word that came to my mind was "Nonchalant". I'm feeling more and more so. It seems like a protective layer or persona I'm taking up. So that I gets less f up by external factors. I used to be diligent updating here, but I lost the joy in sharing what's going on.  I was even nonchalant about updating my net worth. I used to track it monthly; and more so on 31 Dec 2025. Yet on 31 Dec 2025, I slept at 10+ pm. Not sure what time I really fell asleep. Sadly, I woke up at 5.30am and it hurts my head. I never had good sleep. What prompted me to do an update here was just in case one day, I have records to track back my thoughts, and my financial journey. Like how I could check back my interest on 1 January 2025 easily through my blog. --- Here's a recap of my finances over the years: 2016 -  Unexpected review of 2016: hitting $200k in net worth 2017 -  End 2017 review - net worth at $287k 2018 -  End 2018 review - net worth at $372k  2...