My personal finance journey

Back when I was experiencing quarter-life crisis, I started to become interested in personal finance management. It all began, as most stories like this goes, with "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki. Reading this book woke me up from the zombie-like state I've accustomed my self to just to able to survive the daily grind of going to work. It made me realize that I owe it to myself to do something about my situation because I'll never be able to afford to do all the things I want to do, just by being employed. From RDPD, I moved on to "Pwede na! The Complete Pinoy Guide to Personal Finance" by Efren Ll. Cruz. Since this book was written by a Filipino for Filipinos, the content was more relevant to my case and I learned quite a lot more. It taught me how to assess my current financial situation, encouraged me to think about my financial goals, and prompted me to map out a plan on how to go about achieving them. I've read a couple of personal finance books since then and to update myself with money trends and to further supplement my financial IQ, I subscribed to MoneySense, a local personal finance magazine.

Based on what I've learned so far, I was able to start building my investment portfolio. I've recently acquired a new condo together with my boyfriend and I've also started buying old pension plans. I still have lots of debts but I'm proud to say that these are not consumer debts. Let's just say I'm using them for leverage and as soon as I get my bonus/merit increase this year, I'll be able to pay off a significant part of it. Also, I'm still thinking of other ways to increase my income. Hopefully more opportunities to earn will come my way before the year ends :)

Humpty Dumpty

Just as my left foot was starting to heal from a fall I've taken during the not-so-recent typhoon Ondoy, I slipped once again this morning and hurt my right foot. There's no swelling nor fractured bone, but there is definitely some mild pain. I've already applied Voltaren Gel (this was prescribed to me by my doctor way before and I keep it handy for cases like this, which happens too often for my comfort) and I hope that pain does not progress anymore or I won't be able to drive home later. Gulp!

In case you were wondering why it took so long for my left foot to heal, it was because I didn't have it treated. I didn't go to the doctor because I knew I didn't fracture it and I knew that it would take more than Voltaren to reduce the swelling. I needed a "manghihilot" to massage the misplaced blood vessel in my foot back into place. I dreaded going to one because as much as the pain in my left foot gave me discomfort, I knew it wouldn't be as torturous as having my foot injury corrected. I know this for a fact because I went to a "manghihilot" when I was a child and tears actually streamed down my cheeks as she was massaging my foot that was "natapilok". The pain in my foot immediately disappeared after the massage but I guess the process traumatized me so much that I didn't want to undergo it, even now that I'm already an adult. Fortunately my boyfriend's househelp had previous training as a massage therapist so I finally obliged to have my foot massaged.

I did almost cry and it took three massage sessions to get it completely right but it was worth it. I just don't know if I can do it all over again for my right foot but I'll try. In the meantime, I think I need to shop me some new footwear, or a new pair of limbs :p

Vision Boarding

I believe that my dreams are beginning to unfold into reality so to reinforce this further, I visualized what I want my life to be using the O Dream Board. This is a great tool for vision boarding, especially if you don't have the time and inclination to cut pictures from magazines and tack or paste them on a board to be hung on your bedroom wall. You just have to download and install the software on your computer then you can start forming a picture collage from the images found in its library or from the internet. You can save as many snapshots as you want, and you can look at them whenever and wherever you have your laptop with you. Isn't it great or what? I'm even thinking of setting my dream board snapshot as my desktop wallpaper. But before I do that, I'm going to post it here first:

Surprise!

Yes, this is what I've been cooking up. I wanted to cancel my web hosting plan but keep my domain so I set about migrating my blog entries to my original blog site. It was not an easy task migrating content from Xoops Xpress to Blogger I tell you. I even lost the comments and my post dates were delayed by a day. After migrating the blog content, I had to work on redirecting my domain to point to my blogspot. Thank goodness I managed to do all these. Now I can get back to blogging :)