The Monday Read: Autumn Breeze
Welcome to The Monday Read, RetireJapan’s weekly collection of content, musings, and links related to personal finance and life in Japan. Finally I can feel the hint of autumn in the air. It is no longer unpleasantly hot at night, and I have spent the last couple of days working without AC. Praise be! This […]
The Monday Read: Computer Disposal
Welcome to The Monday Read, RetireJapan’s weekly collection of content, musings, and links related to personal finance and life in Japan. Had a really fun catch up session with graduates of our Your First Ten Million Yen course last weekend. We’ve run two cohorts so far, so it was great to hear everyone’s success stories […]
The Monday Read: Post 900
Welcome to The Monday Read, RetireJapan’s weekly collection of content, musings, and links related to personal finance and life in Japan. This is our 900th post on this blog. Yikes! The first post went live on December 4th, 2013. I don’t think anyone read it at the time 😉 Any ideas to celebrate the 1000 […]
The Monday Read: the End of Summer?
Welcome to The Monday Read, RetireJapan’s weekly collection of content, musings, and links related to personal finance and life in Japan. My daughter said this last week. “I think summer is over.” Now, that might initially seem like something an insane person would say, given that we’ve had 30+ days all week, but I think […]
Investing in Health: Home Gym
Making it easy to do the right thing (this is the latest in our ‘investing in health‘ series of blog posts) I’ve always struggled to maintain an exercise habit. Unlike saving or investing, it is not really possible to put it on autopilot. Over the years I have been a runner (was doing 30km practice […]
The new eternal NISA
Christmas came early this year The outline of the new new NISA accounts, long rumoured and leaked, were announced this week. The FSA official page has not been updated at this point, but the broad picture is clear with just a few details yet to be confirmed. The changes are great and address pretty much […]
On Tsumitate NISA
I have changed my mind! I have yet to use tsumitate NISA myself, and until recently my advice to people looking to choose between ordinary NISA and tsumitate NISA was to go for ordinary if you could afford to invest the full amount and tsumitate if you couldn’t. But I have changed my thinking on […]
Optimizing iDeCo
Just a little spring-cleaning iDeCo accounts are pretty low-maintenance. Once you open the account and decide where you want your contributions to go, you don’t really have to do anything else until you reach the age of 60 and want to get your money (you also have the option of leaving it in the account […]
iDeCo Progress 2018
Slow and steady iDeCo is a retirement account (like a US 401k) that locks up your money until you are sixty years old. In exchange, you get to invest pre-tax income (which reduces your income taxes) and won’t get taxed on your investments while they are in the account. When you eventually cash out you […]
NISA Progress 2018
The slow steady grind A NISA account is a way to invest without paying capital gains tax or taxes on dividends. Pretty much anyone who lives in Japan can open one. For more information, check out our Beginner’s Guide to NISA Accounts in Japan. Every year I write a progress report so you can follow […]