2023 Roundup

All in one place

This is the RetireJapan roundup post for 2023. We’ll be going through some successes and failures, as well as my lists of favourite blog posts and videos.

Here is the 2022 post if you want to see what that year looked like.

2023 was the year of rapid evolution

I finally got control of my time this year, which meant I could spend most of my attention on RetireJapan. You may have noticed! We got an astounding amount done.

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.

The biggest success of 2023

Our biggest success this year has to be the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We went from 760 subscribers this time last year to 3,423 today (I would love to get to 3,500 by the end of the year, hint, hint).

I published over 120 videos, got monetised, and surprisingly found that I quite enjoyed the process. As we hoped YouTube seems to be an excellent way to reach new people and share information with them.

RetireJapan TV, which we started in November 2022, is still going strong, largely due to the support and encouragement of my co-host Daniel. Thanks to him and his continual good cheer, professionalism, and sound advice we are into our second season and I’m still enjoying making them far more than I should. You can also listen to them in podcast form -just search for RetireJapan TV on your favourite podcast platform.

And last month we launched RetireJapan memberships on YouTube. For now you just get to see videos before everyone else does, a special badge next to your name when commenting, and to support the channel, but we’re hoping to have more stuff for our members in the future.

RetireJapan Forum

The forum is going very well, and I am still 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. There are now over 30,000 posts on there in almost 2,500 different topics. We now have three Sage members, and a few more who are getting close.

RetireJapan Coaching

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.

I’m hoping to launch a long-term coaching service next year, where we spend six months or longer working on your finances together. Please sign up here if you would like to get more information on that when we launch.

RetireJapan Courses

We launched our first video course last month! It was something I have wanted to do for years now, and with the help of a very experienced editor finally got it done.

I’m really proud of this one. It’s basically a crash course in personal finance for people living in Japan. You can check it out here (please share with friends and colleagues!): The Basics of Personal Finance in Japan

---

We also ran the second cohort of Your First Ten Million Yen online course in spring, which went even better than the first cohort and confirmed my hope that it would be helpful or even life-changing for participants.

We’ll be running the third cohort of the course in February and March 2024 with some huge improvements coming, including a new platform that will make it much easier to take the course, more resources and content, and an expanded support team.

I’m really looking forward to it. We’ll be opening up registration on January 10th to people on our waiting list. Sign up here if you are interested in taking the course next year.

Overall

RetireJapan made a slight profit this year, which is nice. Income rose but so did expenses (I finally hired some people to help with RetireJapan projects, which contributed to a lot of the success we saw this year).

Looking at some other numbers for the year, we made steady progress.

The mailing list went from 2,735 people last year to 2,877 today. On Twitter we went from 920 followers to 1,871 today. On Facebook, we had 1,800 followers last year and 2,200 today. And perhaps most importantly, on the RetireJapan forum we went from 1,554 members and 25,032 posts last year to 1,970 members and 31,816 posts today.

Best posts of 2023

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

We published 25 non-Monday Read blog posts this year (one fewer than 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 Discussing Inheritance, where I wrote about the very candid conversation my wife and I had with her parents about their assets and wishes. Recommend you have a similar conversation if you can. I also wrote a short post on Saving an Emergency Fund in Japan. You can probably guess what that was about!
• In February, I wrote a post on Saving for Your Child’s Education in Japan, a topic that is going to need revisiting now that Junior NISA has ended. Stay tuned for a forthcoming post or video on the subject.
• In March and April I didn’t write a single non-Monday Read post! My apologies.
• In May, I wrote Should I pay off my mortgage early in Japan? and largely concluded that it probably isn’t a good idea for most people.
• In June we had a great guest post about getting Solar Panels in Japan in 2023. I would love to run more posts like this, so if you buy a house or sell a company or something and would be willing to share… please get in touch.
• In July I ended up doing a bit of overthinking and came out with Financial Fears and The Pressure of the Blank Page. Check it out for the dark side (slightly shadowy side?) of financial independence.
• August was (comparatively) a very productive month! First we published Investing in Health: Home Gym, which reminds me I need to get back into the habit of working out. Oops. Next was The loser mindset. I always think of the scene in the library in The Shawshank Redemption. Then finally I wrote about Life insurance to bridge expenses after death, which led Daniel to take action but not me. Double oops.
• In September we continued our productive streak, first publishing the cryptic I invest but I’m not an investor, then an incredibly useful and important guest post about What happens to iDeCo if you die? which kind of blew my mind as I had no idea how the system worked, then a detailed look at how Medical Insurance in Japan works and finally a personal blog post of our experiences Bribing the Money God for the last few years.
• In October we published I can’t afford to [do the thing] which was a bit of a nag, and Making a Will in Japan, about my experience doing just that through a notary public.
• In November I wrote Grind your way to success because I haven’t seen many lucky breaks but things have worked out just fine. Next I wrote our Master Plan Part Trois, but it might already be out of date. Don’t plan to write Part Quatre for at least a couple more years, anyway! In response to several questions I wrote Thoughts on the Weak Yen and Inflation, and finally A moment of silence about a new habit that has helped me concentrate better.
• And in December I wrote one of the hardest posts I have ever written, Letting things go. It was so raw that I had to run it by a couple of people before I published it to see if it was okay. I think it was.

What do you think? Which posts did you enjoy?

Best videos of 2023

A new section this year: YouTube videos. We published an astounding 62 long-form vidoes on RetireJapan’s channel this year, and that doesn’t include short videos or the RetireJapan TV livestreams. Truly incredible.

The most popular videos we published this year (in order by views) are:

1. Should YOU rent or buy your home in Japan?
2. 9 reasons to retire in Japan, and five reasons not to
3. How much money do you need to retire in Japan?
4. Transferring money internationally to and from Japan
5. Dealing with the police in Japan
6. New NISA planning in Japan
7. Should YOU invest in NISA in 2023?
8. I retired at 44 in Japan, but am I really retired?
9. Why mutual funds just might be the best investment in Japan
10. Learning Japanese after 23 years in Japan

What were your favorite RetireJapan videos this year? What topics should we explore next year?

Coming soon

Next year is going to be interesting. For a variety of reasons, I am going to have to go back to work, so will have less time to work on RetireJapan projects.

However, I think that by working more effectively we should be able to keep the momentum going and get a few things done.

We’ll run one cohort of Your First Ten Million Yen in February and March. I hope to continue growing the YouTube channel. I plan to write a blog post every week as well as The Monday Read. I intend to finally finish the 2024 editions of our Guides.

I am really interested in launching a more in-depth coaching service, and maybe even some in-person events. Stay tuned for more information on those!

This is the last post of the year. We’ll be back in a few days with a planning post looking forward into 2024, 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 year of the dragon!