Guest Post: northSaver’s Story part 1
This is a guest post (1 of 5) from a member of the retirejapan community. You can find northSaver on the forum. What is Early Retirement? Imagine you were in your 30s or 40s and were given two choices. You could either work hard for the next 12 years and then never have to work […]
Human Capital
You’re probably worth more than you think There’s an extremely interesting exercise in the book Your Money or Your Life that made a big impression on me when I did it. Basically you try and add up all the money you have ever earned or received in your life. Take your time, make a big […]
Financial literacy for children in Japan
Probably more important than Pokemon A bit of a change of pace today. I came across this TEDxTokyoTeachers talk today. It’s ten minutes and pretty interesting. Genevieve also has a blog here.
Life-changing events
Are you ready for disaster? Seven years ago, I lost my job suddenly. I had been working in the Miyagi Board of Education for four years as an English teachers’ adviser when my boss sat down to talk to me one day in October. Due to changes in the educational policy (the prefecture was changing […]
Wake up, Neo.
Take the red pill I loved The Matrix. I think I’ve seen it about thirty times. One of my best memories from university is a Matrix-themed house party I had in my final year. Epic. So Neo had a choice: he could take the blue pill and remain normal, or take the red pill and […]
Is investing a dirty word?
Sometimes it seems as if investing is a dirty word. There appears to be growing inequality in many countries including Japan and a sense that the system is rigged in favour of the wealthy. In this environment, talking about saving, investing, and building wealth can seem somewhat distasteful. It doesn’t seem to be what most […]
Vanguard’s Principles for Investing Success (free download)
Well worth twenty minutes of your time Vanguard has published a report on investing. Download it for free here.
Money Tree
The mint.com of Japan Moneytree is an iOS-based app that pulls in data from your bank accounts and credit cards, and displays them in a variety of ways. It’s basically the closest thing to mint.com for the Japanese market that I have found so far. The best thing about the free app is that it […]
NISA News
Good things may be on the way… There have been a few NISA-related news items recently, so I thought it might be worth going over them here on the blog. The UK just raised ISA contribution limits to 15,000 GBP a year, confusingly calling the new accounts NISA: BBC story here. After some speculation that […]
Saving isn’t enough
Get your money working for you I believe saving as much as possible, combined with reducing the amount you spend every month, are essential if you want to build wealth and safeguard your retirement. Unfortunately, as many people in Japan are going to find out, keeping your savings in cash probably isn’t enough. We talked […]