You should probably invest too
I applied for a credit card in March 2022. The reason I did so then is because I was still employed, but due to finish my contract at the end of the month.
From April, I would not have a job and it would be hard if not impossible to get a new card approved.
The card was approved and they sent it to me recorded delivery.
Which did not match my official ID perfectly.
So the post office refused to hand the card over.
And it was sent back.
And I had to apply again.
In April.
I called the card company to restart the application, and they asked me some questions about my situation. At one point the rep said in quite obvious astonishment, “You don’t have a job?”
…
“That means you can’t get a card.”
Stretching a bit, I said well, I am living off investments now.
So then she said, “So you’re an investor.”
“I guess so.”
I ended up having to send them statements for all my investment accounts, but they approved the card application and it arrived a few days later.
The spending limit was set to 100,000 yen initially, although they did raise it several times when I asked, and it’s now a healthier couple of million.
It’s funny though, because I am not an investor.
I don’t spend any time on investing.
My investing is now pretty much automated. Every month, my broker takes money from my bank account and puts it into my iDeCo and tsumitate NISA accounts for me, buying the funds I specified when I set the accounts up.
Occasionally if I have extra cash I will put it into my taxable tokutei (tax reporting and deducting) account.
That’s it.
I first started investing 15 years ago, and at first I was trying to figure out how it worked. I read the standard advice, which is to buy diversified, low-cost index funds and don’t touch them for decades, but that seemed too easy.
Surely there was a better way.
So I tried all sorts: hedge funds, investing in my friend’s start up, gold miners, value stocks, dividend stocks, leveraged Russian stock market funds (you can imagine how that went), picking single stocks, momentum funds, solar energy funds, and many more.
Then in 2022 I took a good hard look at my portfolio, and I didn’t like what I saw. So I changed it.
I sold everything and put the money into two funds: a global stock fund and an international bond fund.
Since then I have probably made more money than I would have by trying to be clever, but more importantly I haven’t had to think about my investments.
There is no need to monitor anything, I just add a bit more money each month and get on with my life.
And this is the goal of personal finance to me:
- Learn the basics
- Create some good habits
- Do enough to make sure you reach your goals
- Automate it as much as possible
- Get on with your life
The initial learning curve can be a bit steep, but once it is all set up it takes a couple of hours per year to manage things.
If this all seems a bit scary to you, sign up for our newsletter below, check out our YouTube channel, or sign up to the Your First Ten Million Yen course email list. We’ll be running the next cohort in 2024, and it is a great way to learn the basics alongside other people and set yourself up for success.
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