New Year's Resolution

I thought of a resolution today and I think it is a good one. :)


1) To save money, for goodness sake.


As of today, I have been working for 105 days. I guess there should be no more excuses about having to adjust to a new independent lifestyle, new expenses, yada yada. I used to think that it is OK if I don't really get to save anything out of my peanuts pay packet in the first few months but er, we're in the fourth month now. Therefore, I must try. To try I must. But where do we start? Hm. I wonder if my parents experienced this sort of dilemma before. According to mom, in those days when she first started teaching, she gave 100% of her pay to her mom, my grammy, and she gets a small allowance to go shopping with. All my aunts did the same too. I was speechless. "Back then, life was simpler", she said. I couldn't help but agree. What did grammy do with the money? Grammy bought a house. I was again speechless. A house! And they were earning like RM300. "Back then, RM300 was huge!" said mom. I really couldn't help but agree.

Then dad started with his tales:

"One bowl of noodles were only RM0.03!" Whoa....
"If we found a RM0.50 coin in the field, we would be so happy we would do cartwheels!" Whoa....
"Hey, we walked 3 km to school, OK. When it was raining, we will use banana leaves as umbrellas!"

My uncle, Tai Pak, once told us a story of how he, being the eldest, will always need to trick his younger siblings into walking all the way to school on the first day of school without throwing a tantrum and cry by the roadside. "There, it's just in front. A little bit more," he would say every so often or when the younger ones started to get suspicious I suppose.

And then mom told me that they all bring their own little chalk board to school to learn how to write. It was used over and over and probably passed down to younger siblings. I was like, "That's too unreal". "Real!" she insisted. And just recently I saw a little pink notebook selling for RM30 in Kinokuniya. -_-

Don't know if my dad was being too exaggerated but he also once told us, "We were lucky if we even had soy sauce to eat with rice!"

My mom will go, "OK, not so bad on my side but one chicken had to be shared amongst all 8 of us plus grammy and gramps!"


Whoa. "Back then, it was always waste not, want not".


OK, noted. Hopefully this serves as a motivation...