A large part of living within one’s means is to understanding happiness. If one is happy with whichever level of income, it is much easier to live within your means because you don’t need to rely on external things that money can buy to make you happy. This youtube video on a TED talk by Shawn Achor (which I saw from Jared Seah’s “Singapore Man of Leisure” blog talks about happiness and success which I thought was useful to this whole idea of chasing financial freedom to be happy. Similarly, I found that that financial freedom – which is a form of “success” in life, becomes elusive if we need our happiness to be derived form achieving it. We can be happy on the journey towards achieving it even as we have not achieved it as yet. I am happy because I’ve found a way to moderate my own expectations about... Read the full article →