Happy New Year!

For the last three or four years I have been doing annual plans and reviews instead of New Year’s resolutions. They’ve been working much better for me.

This is the first RetireJapan annual plan, for 2016. Last year was great for me and pretty good for this site, despite me neglecting it a bit in the last couple of months of the year. We had the first RetireJapan workshops and the mailing list is getting into three figures… wooh! 🙂

One thing you can do to help is to tell people about the site here or on Facebook and encourage them to sign up for the mailing list. The main purpose of RetireJapan is to help people take control of their finances and reach their goals, so the more people know about it, the better.

My goals for 2016:

1. Continue with my financial plan. This is finally going well and I basically just need to keep doing the same thing every month, ie saving 20% into an emergency fund (that will also provide me with cash to go shopping during the next crash) each month, 1m yen into my NISA account each year, and helping my wife invest any extra cash. Oh, and stop myself from buying one of these

2. Open a junior NISA account for my granddaughter (I thought I had already done this but it turns out only parents or legal guardians can do that so we have to do it again) and bully family members into fully funding it. By the time she gets access to the account it should be enough to provide her with a basic income.

3. Run more RetireJapan workshops. The next one is in Sendai in January, and I would love to hear from any groups that would like to invite me to come and speak.

​4. Write more here on the blog. I am aiming to write at least one post a week.

5. Develop the information here on the RetireJapan site, including reviews of financial services and more detailed information about products and laws.

6. (stretch goal) I would like to write an ebook collecting the information from the site and putting it into a more readable format. This may or may not happen 🙂

7. ???

What would you like to see here on RJ in 2016?

4 Responses

  1. I’d like to see a comparison between the J401K and NISA. The benefits of the NISA are becoming confusing to me for someone who would have access to a J401K. Would like your opinion on this.

  2. Great idea! I’ll do a post on this soon.
    (short version: the J401k is much better if you have access to it and will be here until you are 60)

  3. I would be very interested to attend one of your workshops. Do you have any planned in Tokyo?

    1. Hi Benjamin
      Nothing planned for Tokyo at the moment, I’m afraid. I will be doing the workshop in Sendai this month, and something either at or around the JALT conference in Nagoya in November.
      Very much open to invitations at the moment though 🙂
      All the best