The Monday Read

Gratitude Edition

Allegedly the Buddha said: “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.

Well, I am not a student but I feel like something similar happened last month when a RetireJapan reader got in touch and offered to help with the conference (more details below).

He had noticed that I was doing it (badly) on my own and just so happened to have organised conferences professionally in the past. Thanks largely to his help and expertise, we now seem to be on track with RJConf2021.

So a big thank you to Daniel Davis. Do be sure to thank him if you enjoy the conference, as it is largely his doing (along with the guest presenters, who very generously agreed to participate on a volunteer basis)!

Twitter

RetireJapan now has an official Twitter account, for anyone that just wants updates but not my ranting. Please follow and retweet and all that.

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (17,065 posts to date). Here are the latest active threads:

RetireJapan Online Conference (save the date)

The inaugural RetireJapan online conference will be held on Labor Thanksgiving Day (November 23rd) from 10:00 to 16:00, with a break 12:00-13:00. It will be free and held through Zoom. More details here! Recordings will be made available for people that can’t make it on the day (where possible) but do come and join us if you can.

If you are interested in attending, please make sure you register through the event page as soon as possible. The conference is free, but we may need to limit numbers if we get a lot of interest due to Zoom constraints (we currently have over 180 people signed up to attend).

This week’s books

I reread Meditations on Violence, by Rory Miller, this week. Someone mentioned in on Twitter in the aftermath of last week’s knife attack and it was just as good second time round.

Also started 100 Baggers, by Christopher Mayer. It’s well-written and fits my investing process very well.

And 4000 Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, seems to be everywhere at the moment. I read the first chapter and it seems exactly the kind of thing I need to read heading into semi-retirement 🙂

This week’s links

1. Craig is off on another walk: The Next 500km+ Walk: Ten Cities Across Japan
2. A bit of a tangent, but I found this blog post by an Indian student in the US interesting: Culture Shock
3. This video is interesting in how it reveals attitudes toward money: Old Lottery Winner Meets Young Lottery Winner
4. We’re all over the place this week! My apologies: Stephen King interview (1993)
5. Video about the Japanese stock market: Activist Investors as Catalyst for Old Japan’s New Growth Dynamics
6. Old article, not what I wanted: Court rules in favor of Japan’s ban on dual nationality
7. I hope this will be resolved before I get a pension. As they admit, there is not much logic to the current situation: Frozen pensions: Britons living overseas hit by soaring inflation
8. RetireJapan might be one of these: Kinds of projects
9. I don’t think I quite agree with this, but it is thought-provoking: The nothingness of money

What do you think? Anything good in there?

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