Happy New Year!
I don’t want to boar you, so let’s cut to the chase 😉
Every year we do a look ahead at the new year, for both the site and me personally. You can see last year’s post here.
So what does 2019 hold for RetireJapan?
In a nutshell, more of the same. We will continue posting twice a week (with the Monday Read on Mondays and an article later in the week), we will try and publish another Guide or two (completely failed to do this last year, so we’ll see if we can do better this year), and we’ll continue trying to promote the site. If you have any ideas for blog posts or sites to reach out to for guest posts or articles please let us know in the comments!
Last year my family had some big expenses. We ended up paying 14 million yen for our share of renovating my in-laws’ house, and 2 million for funeral expenses, flights, hotels, etc for family when my brother died.
Despite this, our financial plan remains broadly on track. This is what we’ll be focusing on in 2019:
- Maxing out NISA -I ended up rolling over most of my 2014 NISA holdings, so don’t have much allowance to fill this year.
- Regular investments into index funds -since closing my THEO account I’ve been paying 50,000 yen a month into my Monex taxable account, using the eMaxis Slim all-world ex-Japan fund. Will probably change this to the new all-world fund in the new year and maybe try to up the monthly amount.
- Maxing out iDeCo -unfortunately, as a public servant my iDeCo allowance is still only 12,000 yen a month. I’ll continue paying that in full each month. I’m also going to take a look at the funds available in my Rakuten Securities account and see if I can’t get a better deal by changing funds or maybe even moving the account to a different provider.
- Pay down the mortgage -I started making irregular extra payments to the mortgage last year. I’m not sure they make much sense from a financial point of view (my mortgage is only 0.5% interest) but it is nice to see the numbers go down and making payments early on makes a bigger difference to the lifetime amount owed on the loan.
- Put some money into my granddaughters’ Junior NISA accounts -our second granddaughter was born last year, so we now have to figure out how much we can afford to put into each of their Junior NISA accounts. A good problem to have, and hopefully other family members will chip in as well.
My kanji for this year is 柔, meaning soft. It’s the first kanji in jiu-jitsu, as that is one of my main priorities for the year, but it is also appropriate because I want to take things a bit easier after the frankly quite unpleasant twelve months we had last year. I want to be a bit kinder to the people around me, and to myself. I want to get more sleep. I want to spend less time mindlessly surfing online. I also want to stretch and get a bit healthier. Planning to start doing yoga regularly.
We’ll see how those end up. I expect I will find the financial goals quite easy (at this point, they are pretty much on autopilot) and the health/lifestyle ones more difficult.
How about you? What are you hoping to do in 2019? What steps are you going to take to get your finances in shape?
Hi, Ben. You’ve posted several times over the years about your goal of eating right and exercising more. I personally just joined a gym in Tokyo this past December, one that charges a flat monthly fee (around 10,000 yen), and you can use it any time you want between about 7am to 11pm (the weekend times are a few hours different, but still basically the same). The reason I chose this gym is because it is a reasonable price, has lots of machinery, and, most importantly, a sauna and outdoor bath—kind of like a Japanese hot spring. I try to go 4 times a week, and in order to do so I have to plan ahead. I have two bags—one for clean clothes and the other for dirty ones—that I have to pack in the morning and lug to and from work. That means I canNOT decide to be lazy and skip the gym that day because that means lugging all of that crap around with me all day was useless. Another motivator I have is the sauna and outdoor bath afterward—so everyday I’m looking forward to the reward (the bath), but there are several steps I have to take in order to get there (my exercise routine). There is also a training staff that taught me how to exercise the right way/more efficiently (for example jogging for 10 minutes before weight lifting and jogging for 20 minutes after to get your body in fat burning mode, and only pausing 60 seconds in-between weight training sets). To think, I had been exercising for years and years at my public gym and seeing no results because I wasn’t doing it right! As a result of going to the gym 4 days a week for about 1.5 hours of exercising, I feel much more energetic and think much better.
However, one drawback is that commuting to a gym takes a lot of time. Over winter break I calculated that a round trip to the gym—door-to-door and including exercise time and bathing time—took about 3 hours per day. And going during the week after work takes about 2.5 hours from when I leave work to exercising, bathing, and arriving at home. It seems to me that you have a lot of goals that you want to accomplish and often times a bit too much on your plate. Exercising and being healthy takes not only a mental commitment but also a significant chunk out of one’s day. If health is your major goal this year, I would suggest cutting back on some other activities, otherwise you simply won’t have time.
Just my two cents. Good luck!
Hi Ryan
Sounds like a good system -use your environment instead of your willpower!
I actually joined a gym recently too and have been going semi-regularly (as well as jiu-jitsu 3-4 times a week). I’m probably overdue a health and fitness progress post… will do one soon.
Thanks for the inspiration 🙂