Rainbow on FI

[This was first published on 03/06/2019.] 1) Practise MINDFULNESS Mindfulness teaches us how to notice our natural emotions and responses, then in turn accept them and respond to them such that it enhances our well-being. Meditation is often used to bring about that mindfulness and, at higher level, the calmness of mind. (Calm being the opposite of stress.) When we are under stress, we will start to develop negative emotions such as sadness, anger, frustration, fear etc. All of which are our body's natural responses that cannot be averted. To overcome these challenging emotions, we must learn to NAV (name, accept and validate ) them, and not to suppress, deny or fight them. Cases like taking sleeping pills hoping to sleep away stress and anxiety, or getting dead drunk to escape from reality would only create more problems as one becomes dependent on these ways to 'escape'. It is not easy, however, to tackle them head on - which leads us to why we should be pract

We can derive immense happiness and satisfaction when we are able to create and build the things we want in life. (More so if these things can be shared with others and be well appreciated for.) Image credit:  Jess Bailey on Unsplash In school, we have been taught to rote-learn and herd-think, which inadvertently made us less creative and able to do independent thinking in our younger days. When this herd-think comes from our parents and grandparents (or close relatives), the pressure made us even less daring to try to be different, to create and build what we think is right because we are afraid of getting shamed by the herd from being different or for failing. Ironically, when we don't know what is it that we want in our lives, we could be easily instigated and presented with blueprints to build things that OTHERS want. Praises, rewards, status, boosted ego, all of which are somewhat ephemeral, got grossly mistaken for happiness. Perhaps one day, the epiphany will come to us tha

The Case for a Fun Portfolio Here's the podcast at  A Wealth of Common Sense . I thought it's a brilliant idea to allocate a small portion of our portfolio to do the "fun stuff" (like what I am doing now for my Defi wallet). Doing so would satiate our desire to manage things and prove our skills, while preventing us from doing anything drastic to our base portfolio or messing up from overtrading. At the beginning, some things can be mistakenly attributed to skill when it's just pure dumb luck. What we can do to find out is by making use of this fun portfolio to see whether it can outperform with consistency.  The time frame can be months or even years. Of course, this fun portfolio is supposed to grow over time if it works out. If the effort input is disproportionately higher than your yield output, and your yield output is not significantly higher than your base (aka boring) portfolio, you know that the fun of it is probably not worth it. My Single Biggest Fear I

If we google a proper definition, living below one's mean is to "not spend more money than one earns". As you know, I have resigned from full-time work. I know I probably  do not have enough to last myself till a ripe old age. Therefore, I am now working part-time and making do on limited passive income for a living, which may seems a little... daunting at first. Due to family circumstances, I deem it as a phase I have to undergo. It is also an experience for me to see how I like the lifestyle of "Barista FIRE". The lean FIRE. Here's an overview of how I save in my day-to-day life. 1) Cook and eat at home as much as possible Besides having more vegs and less salt (healthier meals), we also saved a whole lot of money. A simple meal can cost about $3 or less per head.  Easiest dish to cook would be soup and it's relatively fuss-free if you use an endo-cooker. These days there are many Youtube cooking channels to learn cooking from. Not Michelin standard b