New Year Sales
Apparently they’re big in Japan My daughter just got up early and went out to the New Year sales here in Sendai (for people not in Japan, the New Year sales are basically like Black Friday in the US or the UK, but with less fighting). A few years ago, I used to eagerly read […]
Dying in Japan
Have you made a will? I have been meaning to make a will for a while now, but never got around to it until this week.One thing I found out during the process is that foreign residents of Japan fall under the law of their country of nationality, NOT Japan. This means that you cannot […]
Giving back
Start giving now One thing I did enjoy about Tony Robbins’ book Money was his focus on giving as a source of happiness. There seems to be a lot of evidence that helping others is one of the best ways to spend money to increase happiness. I also think that anyone thinking about saving and […]
Review: Money by Tony Robbins
This one grew on me I bought Tony Robbins’ new book “Money, Master the Game” last month on Kindle. I knew of Mr Robbins but hadn’t read any of his books and didn’t know much about him. In a nutshell, I didn’t like this book much at first but it grew on me. The book […]
The Four Types of Work
Bad, Okay, Good, Great I was thinking about work recently, and I realised that I can classify all the work I have ever done into four categories. Bad work is work that you only do for money. There is no other reason. You are not getting satisfaction, or learning anything. It’s just about the benjamins. […]
One Page Financial Advice from Dilbert (well, Scott Adams)
This really isn’t brain surgery I recently found Matt Cutts’ blog. He’s the guy that did that TED talk on 30-day challenges. Clever bloke. He also did a post about Scott Adams’ financial advice. Great stuff. The only thing I would substitute for a Japanese context is a J401k (確定拠出年金） for 401k, and a NISA […]
‘Losing’ money
Why I don’t really care This month I have ‘lost’ about a year’s worth of salary as the US and global stock markets tumble. It’s my first stock market correction (I started investing after the crash in 2008). Now, this may still end up being a more serious situation for stocks and my net worth […]
Your financial stability
How many legs does your stool have? My favourite way of thinking about financial stability is to focus on income streams and to use the image of a stool. This is fairly self-explanatory. The more legs a stool has, the more stable it is and the less likely it is to fall over if it […]
Recent arrival
Some light reading Just received a package from Amazon. Now I just have to find the time to read them!
More changes coming to the NISA account?
I love it when a plan comes together Just a quick update today. According to an article in the Japan Times, two of the things I would like to see happen to the NISA account may be in the cards: an increase in yearly contributions from 1 to 1.2 milli0n yen, and the creation of […]