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Showing posts from December, 2021

A Year In Review for 2021 - Personal Development (Part 5)

2021 was a year I see learning in a different light. Change the way I learn And it was thanks to my daughter. Let me share my story. My partner and I had been teaching my daughter piano. And the modern way to teach piano is to skip the basics and go to teaching to play songs. This way you raise the motivation level to learn piano. So shortly after my daughter started piano lessons with us, she could play a few simple songs ( with many stops in between). But after some time, she stop advancing. She has weak fingers. She has limited memory to remember the songs we taught her - since she was music illiterate. We took a step back and went back to the boring music theory. And worked on note reading, rhythm, music notation and so on. We also spend more time on hand exercise. This seems to be walking us backwards at first, but once she was able to read music, and had stronger fingers, she could advance forward easily. The improvement was obvious. It reminds me of how I learn things in recent

A Year in review for 2021 - Family (Part 4)

This is part 4 of 6 of my year in review of 2021. In this post, focus is on family or family stuff. 2021 is a good year for family. Most of the time was spent working from home, when I was home. One thing the pandemic did was to make people more home bound. This may be good or bad depending on a person, and of course your home conditions. I'm glad to say I am in the position where I prefer to be at home than out. While often at home, we still went on some excursions. To use up the Singapore Rediscover Voucher.  Now is a good time to go, where you don't need to squeeze with everyone, unlike pre- pandemic. This  space when I go out is an uplift to my standard of living.  In terms of education, I start relying less on enrichment and more on books/ materials when teaching my kids. I realize what the centre can cover in a month is a fraction of what they can learn if you teach. And you can make teaching a lot easier by buying good materials such as books and follow the book. l come

A Year in review for 2021 - Health ( Part 3)

This is part 2 of 6 of my year in review for 2021. The area of focus here will be health. When we get older, health becomes a greater concern. I did a health checkup mid this year, and one item on the list was a relatively high cholesterol. The good one was ok. The bad one was high.  My weight also ballooned after I stopstop lactation. In a span of half a year, my weight ballooned 10+ kg. The effect of eating the same amount after lactation.  I looked around for diets for reference, and decided on a low carb diet. I really love rice, noodles, and so on. Basically starchy starchy stuff. But they are low in nutrients, and fattening. So I tried a rather low carb diet. I also started putting exercise back to my life. There's a running track near my place, and I started running. I chose running because the track was so near that I could hardly give myself excuse not to. If I chose swimming, I could use the excuse of not being able to book a slot. So I run. It was timely that the new sea

A Year in Review for 2021 - Finance (Part 2)

This is part 2 of 6 of my year in review for 2021. The area of focus here will be finance.  Part 1 on a review of my career can be found here .  2021 was a year where I was clearer on what I want to do with my money, and have more intentional planning.  My partner and I did a look at our insurances and net worth to ensure we left sufficient  money for our kids if any happened to us. This was by combining our life insurances and non- property assets, and assuming they are cared for till the youngest is 25 years old. We are in good shape according to the study.Read here for more.  With even lower cheap interest rates now, we repriced our mortgage for our existing flat. This dropped our monthly mortgage by a few hundreds a month with little effort. I talked more about this here . I took a deeper look into my assets. I hadn't been putting much thoughts into my savings and am guilty of letting them lose value through inflation. I ended the year purchasing more ETFs and retail bonds, in

A Year in review for 2021 - Part 1 ( career)

With 2021 coming to an end in a few years, it's time to look back at what I've done in this year. 2021 has been the best year in my life. Not because of career, not because of investment (I didn't invest in any crypto or NFTs). Rather, this is a year where I saw many things in a different light, and decide to live life in a different way. There are some things that I try. There are some stuff that I walked away from, and there are things where I changed my perspective on.  I started this blog more than 5 years ago to talk about 6 aspects, which I want to focus on as a CEO of my own life: - career ( which I referred to as my current business) - new businesses ( simply see it as side hustles) - personal development - health - finance - family This is a year where I've truly thought about all 6 aspects, and made some improvements to them. The changes in all these, are truthfully due to clarity of what I really want.  In part 1 of year in review, I'll review my career f

What I'm Grateful For

With 2021 almost coming to an end, it's time to reflect on what I've done this year, and set goals for next year.  2021 has been a wonderful year to date, and I'm grateful for the many things that I have.  1. Being healthy and alive Being alive and having the health to do the things I want is the thing I'm most grateful for. Living is the best gift. There's just so many possibilities as long as you are alive.  2. Being a Singaporean living in Singapore As the pandemic drags on, and worsen in many parts of the world this year, I'm just glad to be in Singapore.  In some of the overseas offices that my colleagues were working at, some were down with COVID, and they shared with me how they had to purchase oxygen tank and treat themselves at home. To them, it's not about getting a bed in the hospital to get treated, but rather to get their hands on the oxygen tank. While we can definitely do better, I'm just glad I'm at home in Singapore. 3. Having a fina