Dodgy Utility Bills
You need to pay attention Electricity bill A reader sent me a link to an interesting article a couple of weeks ago. The gist of it is that Sendai City upgraded almost 2,000 streetlights in 2010, but someone forgot to cancel the contract for the old lights with the electric company. The city has been […]
The Monday Read
Pre-GW edition It’s been a good month for RetireJapan. We wrote a guest article for the AllAboutJapan site (a quick guide to investing in Japan) and hopefully we’ll have another cool announcement next week 🙂 Here are this week’s links: Don’t know if ‘opt’ is the correct word here: Retiring late: More Japanese opt to […]
Start Investing
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Our mission here at RetireJapan is to give people the information and motivation they need to improve their personal finances and get more out of life. A lot of that is fairly intuitive. To have healthy finances you need to earn money and spend […]
The Monday Read
The snow is gone now thankfully We had our final snowfall this week. Snow under the cherry trees. Thankfully it didn’t last long 🙂 We’re more than a quarter through 2019. How is your year going? Are you making progress towards your financial goals? Do you have financial goals? I’m feeling very mid-life crisis-y at […]
Property Tax in Japan 2019
Nothing to see here Well, it’s that time of year again. Our property tax bill just arrived. Once again, the assessed value of our manshon has increased, resulting in a 100 yen increase in our tax bill for this year compared to last year. I can live with that 🙂 There are a couple of […]
The Monday Read
Back to school edition Well, my granddaughter goes back to school tomorrow, and my uni classes start up again too. Kind of bittersweet: looking forward to the new academic year but a little sad to be busy again 🙂 Here are this week’s links If you are feeling weak, worthless, weary, you may need help: […]
Nenkin Calculations
Show me the money We had a lot of follow-up questions to last week’s nenkin post. One of the most common ones was ‘how much nenkin am I going to get?’. It’s a tough question to answer, so we’ll try to give some more information here. Kokumin Nenkin Basic kokumin nenkin is extremely easy to […]
The Monday Read
New Era starts tomorrow Ooof, can’t believe it is April already. Wonder what the new Era will be called? Guess we will find out very soon 🙂 Here are this week’s links: Not often: How Often Is It a Stock-Picker’s Market? Online application? Great. Can only be done through an agent or company? Not great. […]
The Nenkin Thing
We need to talk I had an interesting email exchange this week with a reader about nenkin. We’ve also had some questions on the forum. And I often see this topic pop up on the r/japanlife board on Reddit. Perhaps it’s time we had a chat. If you are currently paying into the Japanese national […]
The Monday Read
Hot? Cold? Warm? What’s going on with the weather? Still busy, still a bare-bones Monday Read. Enjoy! It’s all in your mind: there is no speed limit. Sounds promising: Is Mark Zoril the World’s Most Famous Financial Advisor? This is a great list: 16 things I know are true but haven’t quite learned yet Saw […]