Health, Happiness and Wealth

How many of you use positive affirmations in your daily life? :-)

What type of affirmations do you use?

Affirmations for financial freedom
I have this affirmation that I am starting to use everyday when I wake up, commute via the MRT and throughout the day. The affirmation goes like this,

"Everyday I attract health, happiness and wealth!"

The sequence in which I say out the affirmation (in my head) is critical. Without health, it is very difficult to achieve happiness and all the wealth in the world does nothing for you if you do not have the health to enjoy it! This lesson was drilled into me yesterday when I was hit with a bout of food posioning! I spent the entire night alternating between clearing my churning bowels at the toilet and curled up in bed weaker than a baby. When I saw the doctor the next day, she surmised that it was most likely the fish that I had cooked the day before that was the cause. She prescribed lomotil and charcoal tablets plus panaco for the fever that had developed.

Health is a critical part of financial freedom
As we continue on this journey towards financial freedom, do we consider how our health plays a critical part in this process of attaining financial independence? You work for a living. You work to save. You work to invest. Working or running a business (or managing an inheritance) are ways that we can obtain our income. This requires us to be healthy in order for the income to continue to be generated prior to us attaining the stage where our passive income sources earn more than our living expenses. As a result, it is critical for us to take care our health and to invest some of that 24 hours in a day towards looking after our well-being.

Diet, exercise and managing stress
Diet, exercise and managing stress are the key components of living a healthy life! Yesterday, it was diet that did me in because I was not careful about food hygiene and that contributed to my bout of food poisoning. I have lost weight in the recent one year partly due to my diet of quaker oats Mondays to Fridays for breakfast.

What is missing now for my health is regular exercise. It is still pretty much a hit-and-miss affair, as I go for runs when I feel like it which is not ideal. I should make it pretty much part of my lifestyle just as I have incorporated frugal living and prudent investing as part of the overall means of achieving financial freedom.

Managing stress becomes easier the closer I move towards my goal of financial freedom because when you have a net worth that grows nearer to your targetted objective, you become less worried about being beholden to your job and more opportunities appear before you.

When my housing loan was a big chunk of my net liability position, I often felt trapped by my job because I was working to pay off my mortgage and you feel that you are a slave to your job. Now that I have settled my mortgage through prudent saving and ploughing all my income and bonuses into the loan, I no longer work for the bank but work for my own retirement and the dream lifestyle that I want to achieve. Each small victory in this quest for financial freedom motivates me even more to continue on this path. The journey may be long and the financial discipline tough but the reward at the end of the road more than justifies the endurance needed to last the journey.

May you find your paths to health, happiness and wealth!

How to gain health and save money by cooking

Cooking is an under-rated skill in Singapore. If you believe in the concept of specialisation of labour, then you would think that it's more efficient for working professionals to concentrate on working and earning money and buy cooked food for our meals.

Well...yes and no.

While Singapore hawker fare is relatively plentiful and inexpensive, the true cost of not cooking is reflected in our health. In general, eating out can be more costly in the long-term because of the health implications.

Hawker food (and even restaurant standard) usually is:

• Not fresh
• High in sodium, oil, sauces
• High in saturated fats
• Bad bad bad for your health

So what's the alternative?

Learn to cook.

I used to be those who didn't know how to cook. Then I slowly picked up the hobby of cooking over weekends by learning to buy the ingredients such as meat (chicken, fish, pork) , vegetables, spices and sauces etc. Learning how to steam, stir-fry, boil simple dishes and soups.

Hey, isn't this a personal finance blog rather than a cooking blog? You're right, this topic is relevant to our personal finance because cooking can save you money as compared to restaurant meals. Recently I bought a whole chicken (1.1kg) for only $2.90! Wow... That's enough to feed me for 3-4 meals as I can chop the chicken into 3-4 portions, freeze most of it and cook each portion for a meal. Coupled with quick stir fry of spinach + shitake + dash of seasame oil, light and dark soy sauce, chopped garlic and onions and we have a simple nice meal all whipped up in less than 40 minutes.

The one thing that I realised from cooking my own meals is that it's very much healthier as you can control how much of salt, fats and oils you add to your dishes. In addition, the fresh onion and garlic are natural anti-bacterial agents which help to kill nasty germs in your body helping to boost your immunity.

Cooking is also a survival skill as you learn how to choose what you want to put into your mouth instead of relying on someone to cook leftovers and charge you $3-4 for that.

Be well and cook your own healthy meals towards financial freedom!

Bring Your Own Portable Hydration Unit (Water Bottle)

Saving money is sometimes about pinching pennies, other times it is pinching pounds! :-)

One of the great money saving techniques which has a strong health benefit is to bring your own (BYO) water!

All of us have to drink water. H2O gives us life and 2/3s of our bodies are actually made up of water. Did you ever stop and count how many soft-drinks or coffee/tea that one consumes that makes up our fluid consumption? If we drink say, 8 glasses a day and drink 1-2 glasses of water, another 1-2 softdrinks and the remainder through milo/coffee/tea etc. How much would that cost is a typical work-day (assuming you have to pay for it yourself?)

2 glasses of water : $ negligible
2 cans of soft-drink: $1.20 per can = $2.40
4 cups of coffee/tea: $0.90 per cup = $3.60
Total daily expenses on fluids = $6.00
x 20 days a week = $120 a month
x 12 months in a year = $1,440.

Wow... That means we could potentially be spending about more than a thousand dollars a year on soft-drinks! The good news is that there is an alternative we can turn to, good old PUB water direct from the tap or from water coolers. Generally, water is "free" to the consumer if you get it from public water coolers or if your organisation provides water coolers for one to fill up one's bottle.

Invest in a good Lexan/Rubbermaid/SIG type of water bottle to the size of your preference and you are good to go in your quest to save money!

Hydrating yourself throughout the day makes you feel less hungry and you tend to eat less. Drinking water also helps moistern the throat and for those who need to speak a lot at work, this will help your voice last longer. Also, drinking water helps the circulatory and lymphatic systems and waste products in our body makes. The amount of money we save from buying softdrinks and coffee/tea would also offset our investment in the water bottle! It's a win-win-win strategy :-)

Of course, that does not mean we have to swear off softdrinks and hot beverages outside. Simply carry a water bottle around and reap the benefits of spending less money on purchasing them. When I was in New York, I realise most New York office workers actually walked around with their Evian/Dasani water bottles and it was part of their culture.

So let's bring out our water bottles and say "cheers" to the money-saving benefit of bringing your own water bottle.