One post to rule them all…
This is the RetireJapan roundup post for 2024. We’ll be going through some successes and failures, as well as my lists of favourite blog posts and videos.
Here is the 2023 post if you want to see what that year looked like.
2024 was the year of reps
I feel like we didn’t do anything particularly revolutionary this year. Mainly it was a case of (kind of) doing more of what we were doing already. We kept going on YouTube. I wrote the Monday Read every week. I wrote some blog posts (more on that below). We ran Your First Ten Million Yen twice. I made a video course. Did a lot of coaching.
It wasn’t always as consistent as I would have liked, but we kept things going.
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 2024
Once again, the biggest success this year is probably the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We went from 3,423 subscribers this time last year to 7,280 today (I think we would have had even more if I had been more consistent for the last few months).
YouTube continues to be an excellent way to reach new people and share information with them so I am going to try and be more consistent with it next year.
RetireJapan TV, now unbelievably in Season 3, remains a joy largely thanks to my co-host Daniel.
We realised that trying to find and schedule guests for each show was making it unnecessarily stressful, so have decided to record interviews separately when they come up and not worry about having a guest for each show. If you have any good guest ideas for us, please let me know!
RetireJapan Forum
The forum is going very well, and I remain 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 almost 40,000 posts on there in almost 3,000 different topics. We now have four Sensei 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.
If you are having trouble getting started, or want a second opinion on what you are doing, or would like some feedback, please feel free to get it touch. I might be able to help.
Your First Ten Million Yen
We ran two cohorts of the Your First Ten Million Yen online course (in spring and autumn), which saw some big changes in how we deliver the course. We now have a hybrid course with a lot of the content delivered on demand so that we can use the live sessions to answer questions and quickly review key concepts. I think it is a lot more user friendly.
Autumn seems to be not the best time for many people, so we are only going to run the course once in 2025 (in February). 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 (no obligation).
Overall
RetireJapan made a slight profit this year, which is nice. We managed to pay the bills at least!
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 1,871 followers to 2,554 today. On Facebook, we had 2,200 followers last year and 2,700 today. And perhaps most importantly, on the RetireJapan forum we went from 1,970 members and 31,816 posts last year to 2,341 members and 39,015 posts today.
Best posts of 2024
And now one of my favourite things: a look back at the best posts of the year 🙂
We published 37 non-Monday Read blog posts this year (way more than the 25 last year!), so I will need to be a bit more discerning than usual. We also hit post #1,000 on the blog in October (The Stealth Company President) but I didn’t notice -shame as I had been planning to make a slightly big deal about it…
Here are the posts that might be worth rereading from 2024:
- In January we started the year as usual with our 2024 Planning post. So interesting to look back and see what I was thinking a year ago (and how much of it came true or didn’t). Then Just the Basics, inspired by an unkind remark on Reddit. Then, just for entertainment purposes, I wrote What happens if US citizens don’t file their taxes? And to round off a pretty decent January the final post was the philosophical How to be rich.
- February was off to a great start with the controversial Don’t pay your children’s university fees in Japan. The controversy continued with Do we really need to retire at all? Then What do you really want? I found rereading that quite inspiring.
- March saw Setting goals effectively will change your life. The four states of personal finance asks the question ‘which one are you in?’ Understanding price and value continued the philosophical start to the year.
- April started aggressively with Don’t move to Japan, possibly our most commented on post ever.
- Then in May Two steps forward, one step back was me trying to think through how to invest with a weak yen and surging stock market. Eight months later we’re still in the same situation! I’m quite proud of Life is a game of resource optimization. The future of RetireJapan explains what happened to our output. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning inspired me to write Search for meaning. Your goals will change finished the month.
- In June I wrote Magic pills and outcomes. And How will you spend your time? And Does your number need to go up? June was a pretty good month for the blog!
- In July we only had one post, Why don’t we just pay off the mortgage? but the topic is so important I was fairly satistfied with the month.
- August I was in the UK with the grandkids, but still managed to write Investing in a time of volatility. And I always enjoy writing my annual pension post.
- I didn’t write a single post in September. Not sure why. Probably exhausted from the UK trip 😉
- In October I wrote Getting married in Japan, because I… got married in Japan twenty years ago. And our thousandth blog post The stealth company president. Not a bad post for that milestone!
- November saw a very practical post Japan’s New Health Card System: Benefits and Drawbacks.
- And you may have seen December’s posts Escape velocity and Japanese health care.
What do you think? Which posts did you enjoy?
Best videos of 2024
We published 29 long-form videos on RetireJapan’s channel this year (a lot less than last year’s 62), not including short videos or the RetireJapan TV livestreams. I’m a bit disappointed to be honest.
Next year I need to work on my video making process, because making a YouTube video has several distinct phases (ideation, scripting, shooting, editing) that make it more difficult to just do it than say, writing a blog post. Hopefully that will help me be more consistent. I would like to publish at least 50 videos in 2025.
The most popular videos we published this year (in order by views) are:
- Moving to Japan won’t fix your problems
- Your questions about new NISA answered
- Proposals to make it easier to revoke permanent residence
- Thinking about retiring in Japan: what am I looking forward to
- Japan is giving out tax credits and benefit
- The 5 best investments in Japan (and 5 I would avoid)
- Inheritance tax in Japan is not as bad as you think it is
- Losing your second languages in old age
- The yen at 160 -what can we do about it investing from Japan
- Should you change your investing strategy because of the weak yen?
- Japan’s hidden gem -why did it take me 24 years to visit?
What were your favorite RetireJapan videos this year? What topics should we explore next year?
Coming soon
Next year is going to be interesting. My family/work situation got a bit more complicated, so we are going to have to figure out what that looks like in the short to medium term.
Still, RetireJapan will continue. We’ll keep sharing information and encouraging people to work on their finances. The forum will keep going (can we hit 50,000 posts?). I’ll keep writing things and making videos.
We’ll run one cohort of Your First Ten Million Yen in February. 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 publish the 2025 editions of our Guides to iDeCo and NISA, and also write a new Guide.
I am really interested in launching a more in-depth coaching service, and maybe even some in-person events. Stay tuned for more information.
This is the last post of the year (other than The Monday Read next week). 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 snake!