All in one place
Once again there will only be one roundup post this year. Here is the 2020 post if you want to see what that year looked like.
2021 was… kind of like 2020
This year was also stressful, but in a different way from last year. More low-key, less uncertainty. More like being underwater than on a rollercoaster. Everything slightly muted.
Still, I was busy, and distracted, and my brain was still mush for much of the 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 1,846 people last year to 2,450 today. On Facebook, we had 1,369 followers last year and 1,600 today (although, to be fair, we pretty much stopped using Facebook for most of the year). And perhaps most importantly, on the RetireJapan forum we went from 796 members and 9,164 posts last year to 1,226 members and 18,125 posts today.
Perhaps most excitingly, we ran our first online conference!
Best posts of 2021
And now one of my favourite things: a look back at the best posts of the year 🙂
We published 36 blog posts this year (barely better than the 26 from last year), so I could pretty much just list them all 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:
- In January, we started the year off with an excellent guest post: Kosei Nenkin — Applying for Your Private School Pension. This gives a detailed look at the process and details of applying for your pension.
- In March, I wrote a short post with some thoughts on investing: Investing Rules. I also wrote The best laid plans, about a plan I made in 2016 and how it worked out. And How to make money investing, a basic primer on how investing works. Quite a good month!
- In April, I wrote Transferwise is now Wise. Still a big fan, and use it regulary (most recently last week!). Also wrote the most boring blog post in history, Hospital food in Japan, mainly consisting of photos of every meal I had in my three week hospital stay. Also Life Changing Money, a blog post that may well grow into RetireJapan’s next big project. And finally another great cautionary guest post: Offshore Investments.
- In June I learned that I had completely misunderstood how Overseas Inheritances in Japan worked, and wrote a blog post correcting myself. Also wrote Income in Retirement about different possible sources of income, and Share your portfolio, a stunningly boring dive into exactly what stocks and funds I and my wife own.
- In July I wrote Planning 3, the third in a series of blog posts about making annual and long-term plans.
- Bit of a gap, then in October I wrote Car died again (you can probably guess the contents). So far so good, in terms of not missing the car too much so far. Then The RetireJapan Master Plan Part Deux, thoughts on how the site and community might evolve in the future.
- In November I wrote RJConf2021 introducing our first online conference (which went well! You may have attended, but if you didn’t you can see the videos on our YouTube channel). And that seems a fitting end to this year’s posts.
What do you think? Were there any other posts you enjoyed?
Next year I am hoping to write a bit more, and also to go back and rewrite/update useful posts from the past. Between the two, hopefully we’ll see more activity on the blog in 2022.
This is the last post of the year. We’ll be back in a few days with a planning post looking forward into 2022, 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!