Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
A quick progress report and request for feedback today.
It’s been a great year so far for RetireJapan. I’m still having a lot of fun (maybe the most important thing) and it seems we’re still managing to help people. We’re seeing a lot more users in the forum and receiving many more enquiries to the site.
We also have to delete spammer signups to the forum and ‘offers’ to run commercial posts several times a week, which I guess is a sign of progress 😉
Here are some things we have planned for the site:
- A redesign and migration to the .com site (which currently just hosts the forum). This will be expensive and slightly complicated, so no timeline but it’s something I want to get done soon. The main goal for this is to make the site easier to navigate, to make it easier for new visitors to find information, and to highlight some old posts that might still be useful.
- More RetireJapan Guides (provisionally mortagages and insurance will be the next two).
- The price for coaching will go up from October. If you’ve been thinking about getting coaching and you contact me by next Friday (October 5th) you can still get the current price of 5,400 yen a session.
- New posting schedule: we’ll keep The Monday Read as it is, and just run one post on Thursdays. News items that would have been shorter posts will be added to The Monday Read. We’ll also run extra posts at certain times of the year (I’m thinking we could do a Progress Report week in December with a post per day, for example).
We’d also love to hear your feedback. What do you like about the site? What is useful? What annoys you? What would you like to see that we don’t have?
As ever, if you would like to give something back, the best thing you can do is tell people about the site, encourage them to sign up for the mailing list, join the forum, share posts on Facebook, etc.
I’d also love to run more Reader Profiles and Guest Posts*. If you have an idea or are willing to be featured, please get in touch!
*we do not run commercial guest posts, so please don’t email us about that. We generally won’t reply.
Really appreciate the not selling sponsored material and keeping the integrity of the site. Hope it continues 🙂
Definitely. The purpose of RetireJapan is to be useful, and commercial content/ads would negatively impact on that.
We do have minor monetization (Amazon affiliate links, the Guides) but hopefully it’s not too intrusive and doesn’t create conflicts of interest…
I enjoy reading the blog. I am not sure what you haven’t covered…but I would like to see some information on alternatives to the stock market, such as how to evaluate bonds and when CDs are appropriate.
I guess the equivalent of a CD in Japan would be a time deposit savings account… with the low interest rates I have never seen the point of locking up your money for an extra 0.05% or whatever 🙂
Just keep doing what you’re doing. I very much doubt I would ever have got round to investing in Japan if it were not for Retire Japan. It has set me on a path where I can (hopefully) see a more comfortable future. If I reach where I want to get to, I might even be able to say it has changed my life, because getting to that point would almost certainly take a lot longer or be impossible had I not got the incentive I needed! (Of course, if it all goes pear-shaped I’ll be back to tell you that you ruined my life.)
Ha, ha, thanks! Fingers crossed you don’t have to come looking for me to complain 😉
I’m also a happy camper! No need for any big changes, I think your doing a big service for all of us(foreigners in Japan) a big favor.
As for something that I would like added to the site, though, is one thing personally I am worried about it. I would like a specific comparison chart which entails all imaginable pros and cons to naturalization, renouncing citizenship vs. keeping citizenship, etc. for US citizens. Combing the Internet last week I just felt so lost and scared haha. If you could provide a comprehensive way to way out the adv./disadv., that would be reeeaally appreciated.
Thanks again for everything you do, your blogged has given me loads of insight to living here, wisely.
That would be quite a big job!
This site is pretty comprehensive: https://www.turning-japanese.info/
Debito also has some resources: https://www.debito.org/residentspage.html#naturalization
The big one is that the US government seems to be trying to discourage people from renouncing citizenship by making it difficult and expensive.