Disaster Preparation in Japan
Are you ready for anything? I was not expecting the typhoon this week to take out Narita Airport and large parts of Chiba. A colleague was at the airport and said they hadn’t seen anything like it since the 3/11 earthquake. Given the potential for natural and other disasters here in Japan, I thought this […]
The Monday Read
Typhoon Time: Stay Safe Out There Week two of our resumed regular service. Seems like this might be the last gasp of summer: I’m looking forward to cooler and less humid days and nights once autumn arrives properly. One exciting announcement: we’re planning a RetireJapan event in Tsukuba on October 26th, in collaboration with Tsukuba […]
Japan Pension Update 2019
More of the same My birthday is this month, so I received my annual pension statement last week. If you are paying into the Japanese state pension system you should receive your annual statement (年金定期便) around your birthday. If you don’t receive a statement I recommend following up, as something may be wrong with your […]
The Monday Read
More like the August Read, amirite? Hi friends Did you miss me? I must admit I have really enjoyed the change of pace during August. How was your summer? Can’t believe it is September already. You may have noticed a change to the Monday Read this year. Previously I wrote the post on Sunday (sometimes […]
August
We’re all going on a summer holiday Well, I am going on a summer holiday with my wife, and I think it might be best if I am not constantly stressing about getting the latest blog post up at RetireJapan. Consequently, I am going to take a break from the site during August. There will […]
The Monday Read
Glorious Summer Well, the rain broke here in Sendai. It’s weird how I seem to have gotten used to the climate here. Summers killed me when I first arrived in Japan, but now I am pretty much used to them and don’t really mind unless I have to do something stupid like walk around in […]
Banking in Japan
The End of an Era For a long time, there was an obvious answer to the question “which bank should I use in Japan?”. That answer was Shinsei Bank. I opened my account a long time ago (in 2006!) and for a long time was very happy with the service. At the time, Shinsei seemed […]
The Monday Read
Technical Problems Edition Apologies to anyone who has tried to use the forum over the last few days. We seem to be having technical problems (forum software is out of date and I am too stupid to update it myself -currently looking for someone to help me with it). Hope to have it back to […]
The Monday Read
Ocean Day Edition Ocean day! I assume no one will be reading this until Tuesday 🙂 I have a jiu-jitsu competition today. Wish me luck. Here are this week’s links: This is not a profit, any more than the previous ‘loss’ was a loss: Gov’t pension fund posts ¥9.1 tril profit in 4th quarter I […]
It’s good to talk
When you assume… I think about money and investing a lot. Maybe too much. I’ve written about our pension projections in the past, and thought I had a good idea of what we needed and where we were heading financially. It seems I was wrong. I had been working off a range of 200,000-400,000 a […]