Instead of one big thing
A bit of a random collection today. This post is a roundup of recent items of interest.
- It’s tax season in Japan. I got my taxes done by my wife’s accountant this year, and he found that I owed 30,000 yen. Oops.
I’m glad to be paid up and legal though. If you’re not sure what to do, check out this site or pop into your friendly (really!) local tax office for some advice.
- Speaking of taxes, the furusato nozei system looks interesting. I’ll be looking into it soon, so expect a post later in the year.
The short version is that this is a scheme to allow you to pay your local taxes somewhere else, and then that place will send you a bribe/present in the form of (usually) farm produce.
Quick writeup here.
- From next month you can choose who to buy your electricity from. Article in Japanese here (they also have a comparison tool). You can do a quick search for many articles in English on this.
I had a look at this in January, and it said my current provider was the cheapest. I’ll have to look again.
One thing I don’t like about this system is that everyone is trying to bundle it together with gas, or cellphone, or internet service. Makes it very difficult to work out which is the best deal.
- It seems like robo-advisors may be coming to Japan. This would be fantastic, so I’ll be following developments with great interest. Quick write-up in Japanese here (thanks to Doug D. for the heads-up in the forum).
The benefits of robo-advisors are cheap access to things like automatic rebalancing, portfolio design, and tax-loss harvesting. Basically it makes it really easy for people to invest.
And that is all for this week. Any other interesting developments?
We use Furusato Nozei every year and it works great. I’m a little curious how this works out for the larger urban area that is losing tax revenue. Anyway you can choose a wide variety of towns with different rewards, usually high quality food products.
Good to hear. I will definitely look into it for next year (and write a post). Looking at the system, I don’t see what the government gets out of it.
Seems that the recipients are spending up to 60% of the contributions on the reciprocal gifts, which means that 60% of the tax revenue is effectively wasted…