TLDR: Vacations and short breaks are an important part of the FIRE journey

Singapore is a modern cosmopolitan lively city with a fast paced lifestyle to match. Given that it is very small and very densely populated it is difficult to get away from things and quiet things down. We are blessed to be here with its fantastic infrastructure, excellent location bang in the middle of south east Asia, great airport, strong currency, surrounded by islands with beautiful idyllic beaches.

The school break of two weeks in March is a time when most families plan a break and leave the hustle and bustle of the city to head to some place quiet. We perform this annual pilgrimage mostly to some place closely given that we have two kids and the younger one is a toddler. Toddlers and long flight journeys don’t mix.

Bintan is one of our favourite haunts given its proximity and good connectivity (an hour long ferry ride). We have visited quite a few of the resorts there over the years and I had been hearing some good reviews about this relatively new resort called “The Residence”.

We decided to take a week long break and booked a nice beachfront villa with a private pool. It was a blissful but slightly expensive 5 days in the resort where we lazed around in the pool, explored the villa by buggy, took long walks by the beach and enjoyed the delicious food (but limited options) in the resort.

This is not a travel site and I didn’t take the right photos to do justice to this resort. As much as we do to penny pinch, optimise spending on FIRE, it is important to take those little breaks and treat yourself, else this pursuit of FIRE will become all consuming and will sap the joy out of your life. It will make you lose sight of why you are doing this in the first place.

As someone had put it

“Life is what happens when you are busy making plans”

So do not forget to live a little along the way on your FIRE journey.