I know, I know. Everyone has their own long list of guilty pleasure - anywhere from traveling to food to even some fetish things that they have nicely lined up for themselves, and so do I.
Being in pursuit of financial independence does not mean the list is going to be way shorter than one who does not pursuit financial independence. In fact, I believe everyone has their own guilty pleasure of joy and happiness, irregardless of what they are.
"Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation" - Leo Tolstoy
So how do I line up in terms of my own guilty pleasure?
1.) Tasting different types of food
Food is one of the category list which I have a soft spot on. I have been indulging myself on nice and tasty food over the past couple of years, some of those may have been a little too extravagant to my liking.
The thing is when it comes to food, I usually will think less of the price than I would when buying clothes or accessories, unless they are priced at ridiculously Michelin price.
Even as I probably would have realized that anything that goes into the digestive system would go out twice as fast, I chose to remain bedazzled by the serenity of food chain.
2.) Itching to make a betting on outcome
The rationale for this is to ultimately test my own strength of intelligence against the higher oddmakers out there and to beat the system. For 15 years now I've been consistently trying to do this and it was unsuccessful, as you would have expected it to be. Luckily for me, I know when to draw the line and not go overboard on this. Habits are just hard to change.
3.) Going for a good massage
Massage in Singapore is as expensive as hell but we still sign up for it for the indulgence. I guess it is due to the stressful environment from work that we decide to call massage parlor a gift from heaven.
At times, when I think back about how many times the massage package price is relative to the other cheaper countries, I feel the pinch. But by then, it was too late.
4.) Watching movies on the big screen
The price for movies has been escalating rather quickly over the past couple of years.
The last I checked was $13.50 for weekend tickets at Cathay.
Some of the friends I had decided on boycotting the big screen due to the exorbitant price increase. Still, I liked watching movies on the big screen, which gives me a very different feeling when watching a similar movie on the laptop.
I am pretty sure that I would have friends who has much more guilty pleasures relating to drinking, clubbing, traveling, IT gadgets, comics, cosplay and many more. I am just glad that despite having a few of these guilty pleasures, I am able to watch my budgets and I would urge everyone to do the same. Once the box is ticked, the world suddenly looks much brighter than we imagined it to be :)
Do you indulge in more guilty pleasure than I do? Please share along if you do and how you overcome it?
