2024 Planning

Where will you go in 2024?

Happy New Year! I hope the year of the dragon treats you well.

I also hope our readers in Hokuriku are safe and doing okay and can get back to normal as quickly as possible. I know from personal experience how draining recovering from an earthquake can be. Take the time you need to adjust and be kind to yourself. Things will work out in the end.

I’ve been pretty busy already this year. January 1st gave us beautiful weather, so my wife and I took our annual stroll to the nearest shrine to my in-laws’ place: almost an hour through the prefectural forest. Everyone else drives to the shrine so we had the forest to ourselves and got to walk past all the cars queuing for parking.

Best thing about the shrine? The doughnut truck (they cook them on the spot)…

Then on January 2nd I took my granddaughters to the National Science Museum in Ueno. We had a nice but somewhat exhausting day out, and I seem to have caught something. Throat is killing me today.

Ruh-roh.

This is our annual planning post. Follow along and comment with your goals or plans below if you want to join in.

Goals for this year

Every year we start things off here on the blog with a look ahead, both for RetireJapan (now much more than just this website) and me personally. Here is last year’s post for comparison.

2023 was a year of production. We ended up making a bunch of stuff. In 2024 I am going to build on those changes and try to have more by doing less. This is the intro to my annual plan for 2024:

Each year I choose a kanji focus. This year’s is 稼 (kasegu), which probably needs a ぐ to make 稼ぐ. It means to earn.

Last year my income went down to almost nothing. I haven’t done my tax return yet, but I’m not sure I will even have to pay income tax for 2023. This was more uncomfortable than I expected, so one of my goals for this year is to at least make enough money to cover our living expenses.

Technically speaking I probably don’t need to do this. Our net worth grew by 3x our annual spending in 2023, and we can comfortably live on 3% of our investments at the moment. But I am not yet completely comfortable with drawing down our investments yet.

My wife’s school too saw much less revenue growth than we were expecting, and we had a number of expected and unexpected staff costs. As a result of this I have decided to work there more regularly this year, at least until we can get the school’s financial situation a bit more stable.

So I will have less time to give to RetireJapan in the near future. I am hoping that by working smarter and focusing on productive activities, we’ll be able to build on our 2023 successes and continue to improve the RetireJapan site, community, social media, and products.

What is in store for RetireJapan in 2024?

Maybe fewer things than last year, but the most important ones.

Looking at our goals from the 2023 Planning post, I did not manage to write a blog post a week on top of the Monday Read. In fact, I wrote one fewer blog post in 2023 than I did in 2022. I did not rewrite the NISA and iDeCo Guides. We did not run an in-person or hybrid conference.

YouTube of course went really well in 2023. The website rewrite (largely down to Daniel and his organizational skills) also went well, and we’re seeing a lot more organic search traffic. We did run one cohort of Your First Ten Million Yen, and I was really pleased with how well it went.

I passed half of the Financial Planner test but not the other half (funnily enough, I passed the paper I failed last time and failed the paper I passed last time). Sigh.

In 2024 we are going to focus on maintenance. Running the forum, writing blog posts and Monday Read posts regularly, and making YouTube videos regularly.

I want to also focus on our products. I have come to think they might be the best way to help people, and by selling them I can afford to get people to help make them, which improves the quality and helps us help people better.

New editions of the Guide to NISA, and the Guide to iDeCo (of course people who bought them in the past will get the new editions for free). A new cohort of Your First Ten Million Yen (we are going to launch this next week, please join the waiting list if you are interested). Hopefully a new video course later in the year (The Basics of Investing in Japan, to join our existing course The Basics of Personal Finance in Japan).

A new longer term coaching service for people who have a decent income but not much in savings and investments and who want to change that with a lot of personal support. Sign up here if you would like to be notified when this starts (no commitment).

And I think that is all I am realistically going to be able to do.

Our personal plans

In spite of not really making any money last year, and consciously making an effort to spend more (mainly on travel and spending quality time with our family), we ended 2023 with our highest net worth to date, more than 33x our normal annual spending. I am still waiting for something horrible to happen, but hopefully after a couple more years I will feel more comfortable with this situation.

In terms of investing I will continue to:

My wife will:

Hopefully our income will recover a bit in 2024 and then we can reassess. I think I would like to do this at least until we finish funding our new NISA accounts (by the end of 2028 if all goes to plan) and then we can think about finding a solution for the school that doesn’t involve us as much day to day.

It’s our 20 year wedding anniversary this year, and we had been planning a big international trip, but that is not going to work out for various reasons. One is taking enough time off now that I am going to be actively involved in the school is going to be difficult, one is that we aren’t as excited to travel abroad as we used to be (Japan is very comfortable and the weak yen makes it harder to seem to get value for money abroad), and another is that my wife’s parents are getting older and we don’t want to be too far away in case something happens.

So we’re planning a few weeks in Shikoku for our anniversary. We’ll do some walking, some cycling, visit some temples and largely try to take it easy.

So 2024 is going to be about calibrating our lifestyle a bit. I also have some personal things to work on too, especially health and relationships. How about you? Any changes of direction in store? What are you planning to do?

5 Responses

  1. This is kind of a dark question, and apologies if you’ve addressed it somewhere else (please point me in that direction if so), but it popped into my head reading your personal goals. How do Nisa/iDeco work when one spouse dies before the other. I’m American, so not doing either of those, but I have other investments that I can will to my Japanese wife. What about people like us with Japanese spouses? Are we entitled to their Nisa/iDeco funds in the event they pass away before us? It would certainly effect investment strategy if not!

  2. Hi Ben
    Many thanks for sharing your thoughts as always. I’m always impressed by a) how much you have already done (net worth of 33 times your spending is impressive!) and b) how you have a plan for each year! My plan is never anything more than “throw all the money I can spare towards a savings account”…
    One question – what would you do if there was a chance of you moving outside of Japan at some point? I recently moved away from Japan (but intend to move back at some point), which meant I had to sell all the NISA holdings I had, unfortunately. I would rather not pay for an “offshore” solution of some kind, but at the moment I don’t see any alternative (apologies if you have addressed this elsewhere, please point me there if so!)
    Jon

  3. About the financial planner test. Great goal to have, and your previous experiences have inspired me. Thus, one of my goals for 2024 is to get level 3 as well. I bought a cheap text and am going through it. Thanks to RetireJapan, I know a lot of the concepts behind the kanji, and I understand the meaning of many kanji, but couldn’t probably pronounce them (haha).