A Couple of News Stories
Worth thinking about TGIF? April in Japan is brutal, eh? I’m reeling at the moment, smashed by hayfever, the start of the school year, and trying to figure out whether to apply for promotion at my job. So, today is going to be a short and sweet post 🙂 I saw this guide to the […]
Big Wins, Small Losses
The things that really matter Most people don’t want to think about money. Fortunately, that is not an obstacle to a making a financially secure and comfortable life. The key is to focus on things that deliver outsize benefits, and not worry about the rest. Frugality and deliberate spending have a bad image. Think of […]
Private Health Insurance in Japan
Might be worth checking out Another guest post for us today, this time by Aper21, talking about private, supplementary health insurance. This is a huge business in Japan, and selling it is a popular way for women to get back into work after having children (this leads to pressure and sales pitches from acquaintances, friends, […]
Review: Loan Shark Ushijima
So, so horrible I got into Loan Shark Ushijima last year in September. My wife was away for a couple of weeks and I was trying out Netflix (didn’t renew the free trial though -too much of a time suck). LSU (闇金ウシジマ君 -Yamikin Ushijima-kun in Japanese) is a manga, a couple of series of a […]
Gold
All that glitters A really interesting guest post today from John. Something I haven’t really considered myself, although I did enjoy Andrew Craig’s book very much. Take it away, John! “Why buy gold? That’s a question best answered by the book How to Own the World by Andrew Craig. The short answer is diversification. As part […]
Japanese State Pension
Some good news for a change Well, it seems like the government has given up on increasing the sales tax to 10%, so they are going ahead with unconditional changes to the pension system without tying them to the tax increase. From August, the minimum period to vest in the Japanese state pension (kokumin nenkin […]
Review: A Man for All Markets
Buffett x Feynman = Enjoyable Read I’m not sure who recommended A Man for All Markets to me. I think it was one of the blogs I read regularly. I’m really pleased they did though, and that I picked up a copy last month. The book really reminds me of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, […]
Mobile Phones in Japan 2
Goodbye SoftBank Last week I finally got around to changing my mobile phone provider. It was really easy to do and I don’t know why I didn’t do it years ago. I do know that since I wrote the first post about mobile phone providers I have spent about 48,000 yen that I didn’t need […]
RetireJapan Tokyo Event
It was SO much fun (for me) Yesterday was a huge day for RetireJapan. We had our first independently-organized event. 40 people came out to the very cool Impact Hub Tokyo in Meguro on a rainy Sunday afternoon for three hours of talking about personal finance and investing in Japan. It was great to meet everyone […]
The RetireJapan Hierarchy of Work Complaints
Of course 🙂 As I mentioned on Monday, I’m a planner. I spend far too much time thinking about what I need to do, what I should do, and what I want to do. I wrote about the four types of work (which one do you do?) and my hierarchy of work situations last year. […]