2022 Roundup

All in one place

Once again there will only be one roundup post this year. Here is the 2021 post if you want to see what that year looked like.

2022 was… really quite different

It was a year of massive change, much of it positive.

On a personal level: my university job contract finished, I decided not to look for another full-time job, and I am still wrestling with the question of what I want my life to look like. Feeling in my bones that all those people who claim that money is the least important part of figuring out retirement might be onto something.

RetireJapan, on the other hand, had a much more positive 2022 🙂

I was busy filling in for a missing teacher at my wife’s school until August, but since then I have had a lot more time to put into the site and I think it showed in the quantity if not quality of our output.

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 saw our first Sage level forum member (1,000 posts) this year, and we should get a second one by the end of 2022.

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. We’ll be changing the coaching service next year and adding some new options which should be interesting.

We got a new logo! The very talented Sam took the time to gently walk me through the process and wait while I ran endless polls of our members to see which version was the most popular. I am really pleased with the final result, that you can see slowly appearing on our various channels. Check Sam out if you’re in the market for a logo.

We’ve had a YouTube channel since 2016 or so apparently, but only really started using it this year. I took Ali Abdaal’s Part-Time YouTuber Academy course in November which helped me develop a lot. I recommend the course, it is very well done (and priced accordingly). We currently have 760 subscribers, which makes me sad as my goal was to get to 800 by the end of this year 😉

We also started RJTV, a monthly livestream on YouTube that we turn into a podcast on various podcast platforms. You can see episodes on YouTube, or just search for RetireJapan or RJTV if you’re more into the podcast kind of thing.

We published a new Guide to NISA, which is already out of date thanks to the changes announced this month. Dammit. Will have to rewrite it again in 2023.

Finally we were able to launch the Your First Ten Million Yen online course. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, and the first cohort was launched in September. It actually grew out of this blog post from 2021.

I think the first cohort went really well, so we are kicking off the second cohort at the end of January. If you’d like to get 2023 off to a good start, or you have a friend or colleague that could do with some help getting their finances in order, please check out the course description.

RetireJapan broke even this year, which is nice. Income rose but so did expenses (I started taking expensive online courses, including Ship30for30 and the above PTYA).

Looking at the numbers for the year, we made some progress. The mailing list went from 2,450 people last year to 2,735 today. On Twitter, we launched a dedicated account (separate from my personal one), and are now at 920 followers. On Facebook, we had 1,600 followers last year and 1,800 today. And perhaps most importantly, on the RetireJapan forum we went from 1,226 members and 18,125 posts last year to 1,554 members and 25,032 posts today.

Podcasts from the past

Here is a couple of podcasts I enjoyed being on this year:

• Expat FIRE Club (November 2022)
• Deep in Japan (March 2022)

Planning to do many more in the future. If you run a Japan or personal finance focused podcast do feel free to get in touch 😉

Best posts of 2022

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

We published 26 non-Monday Read blog posts this year (worse than the 36 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 lightly curated list of my favourite posts from this year:

• In January, we started the year off with the autobiographical How to Get to Financial Independence and the more detailed Baseline Spending. I also realized that My Investment Allocation is all wrong.
• In February, I wrote The Easy Portfolio, which is how I decided to restructure my portfolio (that process has now been completed).
• In March, we saw Another Kokumin Nenkin Case Study Reloaded. Might be interesting if you don’t understand your annual nenkin statement.
• In April, I wrote (and did) Signing up for Kokumin Nenkin. Also My Number Card Health Functionality, Retiring in Japan, and Spending a Retirement Bonus.
• In May, I wrote (and did) Renewing a Zairyu Card As A PR and published Reader Case Study: Kosei Nenkin.
• In June I wrote Japan’s Kokumin Nenkin Kikin in response to a reader query.
• In July I didn’t write any blog posts other than Monday Reads, which led to…
• Digital Detox in August. Sadly that only lasted a few weeks! Also the prophetic Changes to NISA on the Horizon. Got 3 out of 4 right 😉
• In September we wrote A Fun Budget, and published the rather less fun but extremely interesting Energy, Climate Change, and Long-term Investing guest post.
• In October I published the annual Japan Pension Update 2022.
• In November we had another guest post, The Road Not Travelled, about retiring outside Japan.
• And in December we had our write up of the confirmed changes to The New Eternal NISA. We have since learned that under-18s will not be able to use the new accounts, and rolling over from the current NISA into the new eternal NISA will not be allowed.

What do you think? Which posts did you enjoy?

Next year I am hoping to write a lot more, both on the blog and elsewhere. We’ll run at least two cohorts of Your First Two Million Yen. I hope to continue growing the YouTube channel. We’ll relaunch the website to make it look and perform better.

We’re also hoping to run a live conference/event, probably in Tokyo, probably in October or November next year. Stay tuned for more details!

This is the last post of the year. We’ll be back in a few days with a planning post looking forward into 2023, 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!