I still remember vividly about why I wanted to pursue minimalism in my very first blog post “Why I embrace minimalism – Dave’s story” that was written 8 years ago. The reasons that I wanted to pursue it in the first place had evolved quite a bit while I also had new discoveries about minimalism. All these reinforces why I want to adopt minimalism as my guiding light towards leading a simple yet purposeful life. Initially, it was more about the physical decluttering of stuff just to make my house easier to maintain and to avoid buying unnecessary stuff to be more efficient with money. When the ..read more

Recently, I met up with one of my blog readers who read my old article titled ” Do you want to live your life by default or by design – The concept of Mini Retirement” which sparks some thoughts in her about taking a mini retirement. Mini-retirement is a concept first coined by Tim Ferriss who is the host of The Tim Ferriss Show which is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than 900 million downloads.  This is his definition of Mini Retirements: Essentially, mini retirements are a series of intentional breaks throughout your career, rather than one final reti ..read more

After our last day trip to Desaru in April where we went to the Desaru Fruit Farm and beach, we wanted to have more time to explore this region and will make use of September school holiday to do so. We went in via the causeway to our favourite breakfast place Tea Garden at Mount Austin. We usually order the butter kaya white toast, siew mai, half boil egg, steam man tou, steam rice roll, soya bean curd and coffee which cost about RM50 (SGD15). As it was close to mid-autumn festival, we bought some really delicious and low-sugar mooncakes from Tea Garden. (1 box of 4 cost about RM80 = SGD24 ..read more

We shifted to our new Minimalist home for more than 2 years back and would like to show you the design of it and what we enjoyed about living in it so far. As we really love our minimalist theme of our previous place so much that we decided to retained that design as much as possible. The main difference is that we have more stuff with two growing kids but they were constantly taught the value of appreciating experiences over having more toys / stuff. Ally is slowly getting accustomed to it but Ashton might still needs some time to grasp it. Ally simply loves reading a lot and you will normal ..read more

Shirataki Falls in Ehime Prefecture Its been awhile since I last did my year end reflections and the last two I did were in 2017 (birth of my second child) and 2021 (pandemic period). While I was reading my past reflections, I realized that my family had came a long way though the years with the various challenges and breakthroughs we had as a family on our Financial Independence and Minimalism journey. Our thinking, goals and priorities changed quite a bit along the way. So going forward, this reflection post will be a yearly affair so that we could review, appreciate and be grateful about ou ..read more

As we slowly move off from Gold Coast and head up north towards Sunshine Coast, we were looking forward to the last leg of our road trip which started from Brisbane. We will be driving to our next airbnb – Laura’s Cottage located at Hunchy near Montville which is a little town in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland which has an altitude of 400m. The whole drive took more than 2 hours with a lunch stopover and we met our friendly host Laura who gave us a tour of the cottage. Our kids were busy playing with the dogs and feeding the sheep within the compound. The cottage offers a double bed in the mas ..read more

As we continued our journey out of Brisbane City (Road Trip Part 1), we begun our warm up treks within Tamborine National Park. We had been training our kids in the various hiking trails in Singapore for the past one year to condition them to at least be able to hike for an hour or two depending on the terrain. So we choose a few short treks initially to make sure our kids could get accustomed to the terrain and weather there before we go on longer treks in the national parks. Day 4 – Tamborine National Park First stop was Cedar Creek Falls which is located along the way towards our first acc ..read more

Sunset along Brisbane River We have been preparing for this road trip through driving up north numerous times since last year (click here for our Malaysia road trips) to make sure our kids get accustomed to life on the road before we embark on this two weeks road trip in Australia. Its actually the first time we took a plane where its just the four of us, as we travelled with extended family most of the time in the past. As our kids are now old enough to sit on their own on a plane, we decided to go for this adventure as part of our revenge travel this year. We bought the SIA air tickets last ..read more

Our family have been busy travelling during the recent school holidays, thus we were checking up on the cost of living in different countries as compared to Singapore using this cool website call Numbeo. The top 3 expenses for most people are usually the accommodation, transport and food and we found out that maybe no countries could beat us in the first two category being accommodation and transport. With articles like Singapore being the most expensive country to own private homes in the world and Guinness World of Records of being the most expensive country to own a car, I guess all of us ..read more

We have been driving up to Malaysia pretty frequently since last Sept as we were getting bored of our small city state during the pandemic period where we were literally trapped in Singapore for more than 2 years. Not to forget that our exchange rate is currently hovering around 1SGD to RM3.30 to RM3.40 which makes it a perfect time to geo-arbitrage against the back drop of the high inflationary environment. All these factors pretty much sum up the massive jams being experienced since the re-opening of the borders last year. We avoided the jam as we started our day early where we reach the che ..read more