Wine and Money
Not what I thought they were Had a really interesting experience the other day, one that taught me more about my values. I’m going to share it here not because this specific insight will help you, but because it’s a good example of the kind of mindfulness that allows you to fine-tune your spending to […]
Five Key Concepts in Personal Finance
Simple but Extremely Powerful I got into personal finance a few years ago after reading Your Money or Your Life. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to come across a small number of key concepts and think about them enough to internalize them. If you understand these five ideas you are probably way ahead of […]
New RetireJapan Workshops
RetireJapan is heading north… … and that is quite a feat, starting from Sendai 🙂 I’m really happy to announce that there will be two RetireJapan workshops in June: June 18th in Akita City (hosted by the Akita JALT Chapter) and June 19th in Morioka (hosted by Iwate JALT). Money 101: Personal Finance, Investing, and […]
Book Review: Job Free
A nice summary but nothing groundbreaking I read Job Free: Four Ways to Quit the Rat Race and Achieve Freedom on Your Terms last week. I found it through the author’s blog The Voluntary Life and decided to buy it as I liked the look of the blog and the book had a low price […]
How to lose money (the snowball is melting)
A lot of money! (on paper) This seems like a bad year for investors. My own portfolio is going up and down by several hundred thousand yen every day (and trending downwards). Luckily it doesn’t really bother me much (I can sleep at night in investors lingo). As I wrote about about in the post about […]
Review: Interactive Brokers
A fallback option, but not my first choice So I wrote a teaser post about Interactive Brokers just over a week ago and promised to report back once I had opened an account. After considering a few things I decided not to go through with opening an account (details below) but I think I learned […]
Book Review: Handbook for Newcomers, Migrants, and Immigrants to Japan
It’s very good but… The Handbook for Newcomers, Migrants, and Immigrants to Japan is a comprehensive book, covering all sorts of important topics from visas to paperwork to volunteering (I’ve written this review based on my 1st edition, but I have ordered the 2nd edition to keep up to date). It is completely bilingual, making […]
Blog 101
That’s probably 78 too many… ​I just noticed that this is the 101st post on this blog! A good place for some nostalgia and feedback, methinks. I wrote my first post on this site in December 2013. It was triggered (as the site was) by a conversation with a friend about his investments and future […]
Emergency Fund
Basic, Boring, Best? Today I’d like to talk about emergency funds. What are they? How much money should you have in one? Who needs one? And what should you use them for? If you already have an emergency fund and know exactly what circumstances you will use it in feel free to skip this post […]
Interactive Brokers
An English-language option! Not so fast… At my workshop on Sunday someone mentioned Interactive Brokers as an example of a stockbroker working in English in Japan.On Monday I filled in an application form online to open an account. Then Andrew Hallam wrote about them here today. And they called me up later this morning to […]