The Purpose of Financial Planning
Is to win, of course I’ll be doing a short workshop on personal finance on Sunday, at the Pan-SIG Conference in Kobe. As part of getting ready for that, I have been doing a lot of thinking, trying to tease out the basic principles. I came up with the following: The purpose of financial planning is […]
Work Revisited
The Shearon Work Suitability Scale Okay, so I already wrote about this last year. However, I have sharpened my thinking a bit, and the Shearon Work Suitability Scale is now a useful metric to help people think about work, especially when they are considering which jobs or projects to choose. Basically the SWSS divides all […]
Kobe in May
Personal Finance talk at Pan-SIG Conference I am really excited to tell you that I will be giving a short talk on personal finance at the 2015 JALT Pan-SIG Conference in Kobe on May 17th. The presentation, “Personal Finance: One Teacher’s Journey” will be held from 3:40pm – 4:10pm in Rm. 403. For more details on the […]
The biggest danger
to your retirement is… … not getting started. Of all the dangers, not thinking about retirement has the worst consequences. If you put off planning for retirement, you run the risk of waking up one day and realizing that you don’t have enough money and won’t be able to make enough to maintain your preferred […]
The Weak Yen
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come I took a couple of trips this month, to the UK and Dubai, and it really brought home to me how weak the yen is getting. The UK in particular was a bit of a shock. As a long-term resident of Japan who likes to travel abroad and […]
Illness, Old Age, and Death
One of the most important books you could read I just finished Atul Gawande’s excellent book Being Mortal. The author is a doctor in the US who also happens to be an excellent writer. I also recommend his Checklist Manifesto. In Being Mortal, Dr. Gawande talks about what happens to us when we get old […]
15 Financial Rules
Rules are made to be broken I read an interesting post by My Own Advisor the other day (actually quite a while back!) giving his take on 15 Financial Rules. I liked the format, so here are my thoughts: Your retirement income needs to be 70% of your working income.I don’t agree with this. I […]
Two Types of People
There are only two types of people: …those who like money, and those who like things. Those who like things don’t have any money, and those who like money don’t have a lot of things. If you read The Millionaire Next Door, you will see example after example of how many rich people look completely normal in […]
2015 Resolutions
They are pretty boring, actually Last week I sat down and did my personal annual review for 2014, and then put together goals and resolutions for 2015. My financial goals for this year are pretty boring. Basically I feel pretty happy with the investment plan I put together last year, so this year is just […]