It’s going. But not particularly quickly.
So I finally got around to opening a Junior NISA account for my granddaughter. It took quite a long time as the process was a bit involved and we needed some back and forth, but the account is now open and awaiting funds.
The first hurdle is that only a parent or guardian can open a Junior NISA account. I am neither, so when I sent in an application form to Rakuten Securities it came back as invalid.
Round 2: my daughter applied, and had several back and forths as she isn’t great with forms and official stuff. After a couple of phone calls and some more documents it all went through.
Next step is to fund the account. We can put up to 800,000 yen a year into a Junior NISA, which my granddaughter would then get access to when she is 18 or 20 (she’s four now).
We have decided to go around all her family members and ask for contributions (grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.). Hopefully that will get us up to the limit, although we only have about three weeks to get it all done to use this years’ NISA allowance.
Then I have to figure out what to invest in, as I will be administering the account. My thinking here is that it should be as simple as possible because my daughter or granddaughter may eventually end up running the account if I am not around.
So I decided to buy one domestic fund. This makes things easy, as there will be no need to convert currencies, and with just one fund it will just be a case of buying the fund when investing, and selling the fund when taking money out.
Thanks to some advice on the RetireJapan Forum, I chose 1551, a world stock fund excluding Japan. Hopefully this will deliver decent growth over the next two (or five) decades.
Anyone else started a Junior NISA account? How are you getting on?