The Monday Read: the pleasure of cool evenings

RetireJapan Monday Read logo and illustrative photo of newspapers and coffee.

Welcome to The Monday Read, RetireJapan’s weekly collection of content, musings, and links related to personal finance and life in Japan. What an underrated pleasure it is to sleep with the windows open at night. We were finally able to turn the AC off this week (but I still have a fan on low at […]

The Monday Read: Autumn Breeze

RetireJapan Monday Read logo and illustrative photo of newspapers and coffee.

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

RetireJapan Monday Read logo and illustrative photo of newspapers and coffee.

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

RetireJapan Monday Read logo and illustrative photo of newspapers and coffee.

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?

RetireJapan Monday Read logo and illustrative photo of newspapers and coffee.

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 […]

iDeCo for Dependent Spouses

Is it actually worth doing? We actually wrote about this last year, but a friend of my wife’s asked me about it last week and I realised I didn’t have a good understanding of all the factors, so I figure I might as well get a blog post out of doing the research (and it […]

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

iDeCo

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 […]