Birthday Celebration

Celebrated my wife’s 28th birthday over the weekend by having a nice dinner at Whitegrass. What caught our eye when choosing the restaurant was that the chef/owner Sam Aisbett trained in Quay and Tetsuya’s, which are our favourite fine dining restaurants in Sydney. The service & food were excellent and we even got to drop by the kitchen to speak to Sam himself!

It’s not that this personal finance blog is about to become a food blog. It’s just more interesting for me to mention our other interests as well. Yes, we like to eat at fine dining restaurants for special occasions and this is one of our main spending areas. It’s something that we have been doing since working & living in Australia and we have continued to do it here in Singapore even though it is more expensive.

I know how personal finance bloggers like me keep going on about reducing expenses and fine dining is definitely something we can cut back on. Makes you wonder why we continue to budget for this? Because it’s one of the core things that make up who we are as a couple. The pursuit of more savings, more investments, financial freedom etc can be never ending. But you must never forget what makes you happy. Sometimes, we become so focused on the goal of financial independence that we ignore and sacrifice many things to achieve it.

This post is not about encouraging one to spend freely on everything that makes you happy. It is about you figuring out what you should spend on that is important in making you happy. For us, we have worked hard to get to a point where we can budget for such fine dining expenses. More importantly, this is how we take the time and make the effort to dress up, date each other again and celebrate the many milestones we have achieved together. Here’s to thanking my wife for staying on this journey with me and to us for striving together!