Another milestone. Another step forward.

A few weeks back, I started to toy with the idea of setting up a wordpress website myself for to get myself more committed on developing the financial aspects of my life. And after brainstorming some names and some discussion with Dearest, I went on to set it up on last Wednesday night!

It's something new for me. Usually, I would just go for the free and convenient choice, like this blogspot. haha.. but I would want endeavor to be more professional, so I decided to go for wordpress, with my own domain name. 

The contents that I will be working on that financial blog, would be the things that are relevant to my current life trajectory, like savings account, cpf, hdb loan, etc. I'm not sure how things will go, or whether would I have enough contents (and motivation) to keep that blog going, but I think it's good to just try it out first! I believe those contents are worth sharing, and they would benefit those who come across. 

As a young adult in Singapore, it's not easy earning money while trying to save up for future plans (e.g. wedding, house, family), and also preparing to support our aging parents. All these, and the desire to gain financial independence, is pushing me more and more as I approach my 30 years of living.

Wedding Plan - Part 4

Yes~! After around 2 months+ worth of researching and visiting, we have finally settled on which bridal studio to go with!

Our criteria was fairly straightforward:

• Good service
• Good rapport with the sales personnel and the people who we will interact with most
• Affordable pricing (Dearest did a lot of research on this)
• All soft copies of pre wedding shoot returned
• Suitable gowns

And it seems that Kelly's Bridal fit the bill quite nicely. Not only that their service was among the top that we have experienced so far from around 5 or 6 places, but Dearest also had a good interaction with them. The price was really one of more affordable ones that we have found so far, and Dearest like their gowns a lot. And so, on our 2nd visit to Kelly's Bridal last sat, we have officially placed our deposit. WooHoo~!

Along with that, we also confirmed Leftear photography as our Actual Day Photography, and we also confirmed our Pre Wedding Shoot Photography, but I can't remember the actual. It's either happycouplepeople, or happypeoplecouple, or something along this line. Dearest really liked their work, and we're going with them.

What's left is to decide who to be our videographer on the actual day. We have limited our choices down to two, and will be meeting them soon~

In addition, we recently found out from the HDB website that our BTO completion date got pushed forward again. So we will be receiving our keys in this year, Q3! That's like another 3 to 6 months! It's coming so fast, we feel like we need to catch our breath with all these wedding and renovation stuff coming along.

At least we are starting early on all these things. And I'm glad she pushed us to quickly settle all these stuff. haha.. If it was all on me, I think I would just be starting to plan things now only.

Life's Motivation

Woke up feeling reluctant to get out of bed and get to work. The thought to myself was, "ah... work again..."

So I thought to myself,

"If work doesn't gives me motivation, 

let the other aspects of life do."

This was enough to get me seated upright, did a couple of deep breathing, and got my ass off the bed to wash up.

While I tried to search through the web for an inspirational quote about my morning insight, nothing came up. Isn't that strange? Could I be the first to think of life this way?

And then I realized, that perhaps this insight could only be a temporary vindication. Work is a large part of our adult lives, and if work is not a passion, am I doing what I'm advocating? To live my life? It's an ongoing question that I struggle with from time to time; mostly when I'm lazy to crawl out of bed to get to the office.

Everyone wants to strive for a good balance in their life. Yet, wanting and working towards it, are completely two independent matters. The first is just a desire (and maybe a bit of a daydream), while the other require courage, effort, and a game plan.

Source

May I strive towards passion, and not stress.

Plotting out my expenses for 2017 (First 8 weeks)

I have been recording my every expenses in life, as much as I can remember, for around 3 years + now. Although I have the data at hand, I didn't really commit time to do anything with it.

So, as for a start, since 8 weeks have passed for the year 2017, I have decided to just quickly conjure up some graphs for quick observation of the trends.

Tada~! After so many years of putting in effort to record, I did up only the recent 8 weeks of data. haha..  Still, it's a start.

The graph only showed 4 categories, which are the 4 most common categories that I usually record. There are another 10 more, but most are rather fixed expenditure like income tax, or have rare occurrences like medical. I will just leave them out first and see how I can better illustrate them as I go along.

Let's see some averages:

Categories	Average
Food & Beverages	$106.22
Transport	$37.00
Leisure	$15.24
Shopping	$81.63
Total	$240.09

The F&B trend seems rather stable across the 8 weeks, and seemingly dropping recently. But unfortunately, not for my weight. The transport fee increased a bit over Week 5 to 7 due to some uber/cab. The spike in Week 3 for shopping was for a CNY hamper for Dearest's family, and my CNY clothes, and a personal shopping item - a packable 28L backpack from matador. I think this kinda hiked up the average quite a lot. haha.. As for leisure, also quite minimal expenditure I must say.

The average expenditure for these common categories are only at $240, which means the monthly average is around $1K. Yet, my monthly expenses, together with all the other categories, always go beyond $2K++. hmm... WHY?! What did I spend my other $1K (or ++) on ??

Maybe next week I would do a more detailed analysis, with more categories included.

Wedding Plan - Part 3

Through the discussion with friends and colleagues, I kinda got the idea that we would need to book our Justice of Peace rather urgently because the popular ones would be taken up. So as we pondered over which bridal studio and package to take up, we also went to ask for the availability of some popular and bilingual JOPs.

Our criteria were fairly straightforward.

1) Bilingual - Important because her dad and my mum don't really know english well

2) Good reviews - Always a good thing to know that other couples liked the way he did the ceremony

3) Humorous - Good to enjoy a few laughs here and there to make the whole ceremony more enjoyable 

4) Fatherly look - Just because it looks more appropriate for the occasion. haha..

It didn't took us long to find Mr Zenon Teh, who fulfilled all the above criteria, and was also free for our wedding date.

And in the process of finding JOPs, we realized we might have been a bit kiasu to book a JOP one year in advance. haha..

But hey, that's still one thing down!

#teamJC

To My Valentine

Over the years, gradually, me and Dearest started celebrating Valentine's Day in a less and less conventional way. And this year, we decided to just treat it as a normal day. haha..

But she is still my Valentine, and will forever be.

To you, my Dearest, my love.
I dedicate this song to you.



如果爱上对的人，每天都是情人节。
而妳，就是那对的人。

Love,
J

Trying to get back to exercising

It's really fast. Just a blink of an eye, and the 1st month of the new year just flew by.

I have done practically nothing on my personal life. But I did get a lot of things going for the wedding. So, that's still something.

For the past 2 days (including today), I have been going home early (and getting to work early) so that I could do some exercise at the stadium before dinner. It's much better than exercising after dinner. Supposedly, it's healthier as I don't have to run with my dinner being digested in my stomach. If my secondary school biology knowledge serves me right, the digestive system requires blood to do all the digestive work in the stomach and intestines (and others?), and exercising would force the blood to flow to the muscles instead of the digestive system, causing the indigestion as a result.

Second of all, I get to have more time to myself at night, like what I'm doing now. =)

Viper Challenge @ Sentosa is coming up on 11th Feb, next next Sat. So I'm kinda training for it now, and hopefully the habit of exercising will stay.

Also signed up for the Spartan Race Super in May (I think), because of a Chinese New Year offered. It was on promotion! So I just signed up. And the price that I paid, seems really like a huge promotion. Let's just say that I don't think they meant for me to pay that price.

Work is getting more and more busy as the deliverable date draws nearer. But at the same time, I'm doing my best to be more productive and efficient at work so I could come home on time to exercise and to do my learning on mobile app development. It's discouraging to keep getting on and off this learning track, but I want to keep on going at it. I used to think that once the deliverable comes, work shall come first, and all the nights of OT will therefore take priority over other things in life. But to seriously think about this, I realized that work is not my top priority; exercising and learning are. That said, without the money that work brings in, I don't think I can survive too. haha.. I guess, OT is not my top priority.

I should also make a point to blog more often; to update more often on what I'm doing to live my life. That was the point of setting up this blog anyway. It's suppose to make me feel guilty every single time I blog and I realized I am still hentak-kaki-ing.

Get going!