Building a House in Japan
The nightmare begins Regular readers may remember that I bought a manshon last year, and renovated it by installing inner windows and a second door at the entrance. I am very happy with my new home and was not planning to make any changes. Earlier this month my wife told me that it was extremely […]
Relativity in Personal Finance
Mind-bending Stuff Personal finance seems annoyingly slow a lot of the time: save 20,000 yen a month and invest it in the stock market, and thirty years later it might be worth 8 million yen pay your mortgage every month, and in 35 years time you’ll ‘own’ your house max out your NISA account every […]
Review: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
The Blueprint Scott Adams is best known for creating and writing Dilbert. He’s also written a handful of books, including How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I couldn’t get into God’s Debris (a philosophical/religious thought experiment), but this semi-autobiography was much more readable. Part life history, part self-help book, it’s a […]
Investing in Health: Stress
Better to bend than break The fourth installment in our investing in health series. We previously talked about diet, exercise, and sleep. Stress, (and its cousin, mental illness) has a wide variety of causes. Some of the time you can make improvements to your physical situation (diet, exercise, and sleep) and thus make things better. If in doubt, […]
UK State Pensions 3: The Saga Continues
Will it never end? I first started looking at the UK state pension last year after Gareth tried to tell me about it several times. After dealing with HMRC I posted an update. A couple of days ago I received the following letter. As seems to be par for the course, there was both good […]
Interview: Wilhelmina Penn
Author of The Expat’s Guide to Growing Old in Japan Last week two different members of the RetireJapan community got in touch to tell me about The Expat’s Guide to Growing Old in Japan. Intrigued, I took a look at it, then bought it, read it, and was so impressed that I got in touch […]
Investing in Health: Sleep
More powerful than you can possibly imagine? The third installment in our investing in health series. We previously talked about diet and exercise. Today we are going to talk about a powerful factor that many people overlook: sleep. You may think sleep is important to keep alert, but it is possibly as if not more […]
Home Improvements: Low Flow Shower Heads
This one’s for everyone to consider Our new low-flow shower head When we got our flat done up a few months ago, I asked the company to get me a low-flow shower head as well. I got the idea after reading this post by Mister Money Mustache. I was a bit worried about the quality […]
Travel Hacking for Emergencies
When you need it most The very cool Lufthansa 747-800 that took us to Frankfurt. We were on the upper deck this time. We’ve talked about travel hacking before on the blog. It’s a great way to travel for free, or (my preference) to travel in luxury for about the same price. It’s also useful […]
Low Energy Home Improvements
Something you can do this year? Installing these can be an upgrade for your life I’m really pleased to offer you the third and last (for now) guest post from Mark Brierley today (you can see his first one on low-energy here and the second on building a low-energy house here). Mark is a certified Passivhaus consultant and blogger, […]