2020 Roundup

All in one place

Once again there will only be one roundup post this year. Here is the 2019 post if you want to see what that year looked like.

2020 was… not great

This year has been very stressful, and we were among the ones lucky enough not to suffer any health or financial problems! A lot of people had it far worse.

Still, I was busy, and distracted, and my brain was mush for much of the year. RetireJapan suffered the consequences, and for most of the year the site has just been treading water. I wanted to have done much more, but given how 2020 turned out maybe treading water was good enough. After all, we avoided drowning and will have a chance to do better next year.

The main goal of RetireJapan is to help people by providing information and a place to ask questions and share ideas. I think we are more or less succeeding at that. In particular, the forum is going very well, and I am very proud indeed of the community we have there. Thank you so much to all our active contributors who often answer questions quicker and better than I can.

We continued running the coaching service, and I enjoyed meeting more people through that this year. The range of queries was interesting, but almost all of them boiled down to figuring out the next step to take and making sure people had enough information and confidence to take it.

RetireJapan broke even this year, which is nice. Income slightly exceeded expenses.

Looking at the numbers for the year, we made gradual progress but it seems to be slowing down. The mailing list went from 1,410 people last year to 1,846 today. On Facebook, we had 1,220 followers last year and 1,369 today. And perhaps most importantly, on the RetireJapan forum we went from 564 members and 5,507 posts last year to 796 members and 9,164 posts today.

A lot of this is due to the fall in activity on the site (we didn’t manage to write blog posts for too many weeks this year), but I would like to ask everyone to spread the word about RetireJapan to friends, colleagues, and strangers even more in 2021. I’m sure there are plenty of people who could improve their lives by learning a little bit more about personal finance and getting some encouragement to get started.

Best posts of 2020

And now one of my favourite things: a look back at the best posts of the year 🙂

We only published twenty-six blog posts this year, so I could pretty much just link to all of them here and not worry about choosing! In the interests of quality control though, this is the curated list of my favourite posts from this year:

• From January, we have Levels of Wealth. This post explores a few ways this think about your current wealth (or lack of it). Interestingly, thanks to our unexpected stock market gains in 2020, we seem to have moved up a category.
• From February, we have The Dark Side of Financial Advice. This perennial post should probably be pinned to the top of the blog. Just this month we have saved at least two people from these sharks (one a coaching client, one a poster in the forum) but there are many more potential victims out there.
• Also from February, these posts on Disaster Preparation: Diseases and Disaster Preparation: Diseases 2 have actually aged quite well given that I wrote them before Covid really kicked off internationally. I wonder what kind of thing we should be praparing for in 2021?
• And also from February (what a productive month!) Some Thoughts on the Stock Market. This also worked out very well given the stunning recovery and subsequent growth of markets worldwide. But you could write this post at any point and the advice would still be good.
• In April we had something positive in this wonderful guest post about Adoption in Japan from Sean. I’m a huge fan of his blog and newsletter as well.

Aaand the rest of the year was a bit of a wash. What do you think? Were there any other posts you enjoyed?

This is the last post of the year. We’ll be back in a few days with a planning post looking forward into 2021, but until then I would like to say thank you for being with us this year, I hope you have a relaxing and enjoyable break, and see you in the new year!