The Monday Read
Everything seems… fine? No natural disasters today. Phew. Although it seems like we might still have a couple of typhoons to get through before winter settles in. Speaking of typhoons, I hope they don’t disrupt our RetireJapan seminar in Tsukuba this week. Really looking forward to that one. This week’s links Make things interesting: Terrible […]
The Cost of Children in Japan
Does it really cost 30 million yen to raise a child? We had an interesting question from a reader a couple of weeks ago. They wanted to know if raising children in Japan really cost 30 million yen per child. Let’s take a look at that number and where it comes from (and if it […]
The Monday Read
Post-typhoon edition Well, that was exciting. Wasn’t really expecting the typhoon to dump quite that much water on Miyagi. Fortunately we live on the third floor and have very robust windows. One of the areas they kept showing on TV (where a river burst its banks and flooded a bunch of houses and manshons) is […]
UK State Pensions 6
Not this again You may remember our fun series about UK state pensions, mainly focusing on voluntary contributions from abroad. If you are deemed eligible to do this it is currently one of the best investments I know of* UK State Pensions UK State Pensions 2 UK State Pensions 3: The Saga Continues UK State […]
The Monday Read
Recovery Edition Well, shingles is no fun. Got the all clear from my doctor on Friday but still feeling very much drained. Went to my jiu-jitsu tournament on Sunday and competed in my own weight class but withdrew from the open class. Disappointing but didn’t want to risk it. That was also the reason we […]
The Monday Read
Shingles edition Well, I came down with shingles last week (at least that’s what my unreliable* doctor thinks). So far it is not much fun 🙂 We still have some places for the Tsukuba Seminar on October 26th. If you are interested, you can find more info and register here. Thanks again to Doorkeeper for […]
Cashless Rebates
How does 2-5% cashback sound, sir? Have you noticed that recently a lot of shops suddenly have ‘we take PayPay’ and similar signs up? There are also a lot of places that recently started accepting credit cards, using those little blue card readers to process the payment. It seems this is not a spontaneous occurence, […]
The Monday Read
Cheat day edition I’m on a (so far pretty successful) diet at the moment, but today kind of turned into a spontaneous cheat day as we all had the day off, lots of amazing food was cooked at home, and I happened to walk past one of our favourite cake shops. It’s all good though, […]
iDeCo for Dependent Spouses
Is it actually worth doing? We actually wrote about this last year, but a friend of my wife’s asked me about it last week and I realised I didn’t have a good understanding of all the factors, so I figure I might as well get a blog post out of doing the research (and it […]
The Monday Read
Rain, rain, go away. Seems there is another typhoon on the way (Typhoon #16). Hopefully it will fizzle out and be less destructive than the last one. As we head towards the final quarter of 2019, I find it useful to sit down with my wife and take stock: how are we doing with our […]