Other Progress 2018

Bit of a mixed year

This is the last progress report, and contains everything else. In a way NISA and iDeCo are easy, because they are a bit of a no-brainer and can be set up and basically ignored after that.

Figuring out what else to do is more challenging.

This year I did mainly four things outside of my tax-advantaged accounts:

• Bought cryptocurrencies.
• Started overpaying my mortgage.
• Set up a regular order to buy mutual funds.
• Continued buying dividend stocks.

Cryptocurrency

Predictably the cryptocurrency thing didn’t end well. I ended up losing almost 200,000 yen and wasted some time opening and using the account. Oh well.

I don’t intend to resume buying crypto anytime soon 🙂

This experience (again) demonstrates the importance of doing sensible things with most of your money and only using a small amount for more risky investments.

It’s probably also a good idea to avoid investing in things you don’t understand.

Mortgage

Overpaying our mortgage doesn’t make much sense to me logically (our mortgage is at 0.5% and will be paid off in full if I get any kind of cancer), but seeing the balance go down feels good and it’s a guaranteed return of sorts. I like the idea of not having any debt too.

Our annual mortgage payments are around 360,000 yen, so I am planning to overpay by 50-100% a year going forward.

Mutual Funds

I opened an account with Monex Securities (mainly to get access to their system so I can help coaching clients with it) and set up a regular monthly purchase of a mutual fund. It was pretty easy to set it up so they take the money directly from my Shinsei Bank account every month.

Here’s what it looks like at the moment:

The upper version of the fund pays out a dividend, while the lower one reinvests it. Initially I was investing 40,000 yen a month, but increased it to 50,000 after a few months. I’m expecting a slight raise from January, so am hoping to increase it again to 60,000 yen a month.

This investment is completely automated so is a very effective way to build wealth over time.

Dividend Stocks

I’m kind of in two minds about dividend stocks. On the one hand I love the idea of a passive income stream from dividends that rises over time. It’s really satisfying to see the number go up each month and year, and it’s relatively straightforward to set goals etc.

On the other hand I am pretty sure I would have more money now if I had just put the money into index funds instead.

I also greatly reduced my dividend income by selling all my fossil fuel stocks earlier in the year.

I think going forward I will continue buying dividend stocks in my NISA account and possibly outside it, alongside my more sensible index fund investments.

How about you? Anything to report?