The Monday Read

AI Edition

I’ve been playing with Dall-E (they opened it up to anyone last week) and it is kind of fun. It seems some of the writing AIs are pretty good too.

Interesting to see where this ends up.

Microblog

Sent the first microblog entries (a bumper edition for most of September) to people with supporter memberships yesterday.

Here is a representative sample:

September 21

Went to look at a house we aren’t in a position to buy today. It’s near my wife’s school in a very expensive area. 48.5m yen asking price.

Turned out to be really nice. Needs a lot of work, so probably tack on another 10m in renovations to get it up to scratch. We could buy it but it would take a large amount of our resources and the opportunity cost would likely und up being in the hundreds of millions of yen (buying the house compared to letting the investments compound for the next few decades). It’s the perennial problem. Buy now or wait and have much more money to buy later (but then when do you buy?).

YouTube

Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We published a short video about NISA accounts and another one about Tsumitate NISA. Also with a little help from a friend got the millionaire English teacher video finished.

Please like and share them with people that might be interested!

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (23,736 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

Picked up Financial Freedom, by Grand Sabatier. Only just started it, but seems readable so far.

Still reading Clockwork (the need to stop every couple of lines and take notes is really slowing me down) and slogging my way through The Ink Black Heart. Recommend the former if you run a business, don’t really recommend the latter…

This week’s products

I was very excited to see Amazon’s new writeable Kindle. Been wanting something like this for a while. It’s a bit pricy though!

I’m a bit of a pen geek, and was thrilled to find a new pen that is even better than the Jetstreams I’ve been using for the last few years. Love the feel of these.

Also found the best notebooks I have ever used, at a shop called Flying Tiger (there is one in our local Aeon Mall). The weight (light), the feel (cloth), the design, the paper (off-white, no lines). Perfect.

That is one of the Acroball pens next to it.

This week’s links

1. This is discouraging. So much public money gets wasted here: New shinkansen comes up short
2. This was good, but I disagree with a couple of minor things (Youtube): How To Retire Early – A Guide to Financial Freedom
3. This is a very good introduction from Monevator: Passive investing guide
4. Wild stats in here: Growing Indifference to Relationships and Sex in Japan
5. I like this guy. His book is very good: How To Retire Early (and be in the top 1%)
6. Really interesting fact about water I didn’t know: Monetary Policy is Non-Linear
7. Furusato nozei in English (I’d rather see NISA and iDeCo in English first): New platform encourages Japan’s foreign residents to use tax donation programs
8. Some of these are pretty good. A timely reminder: 50 ways to be ridiculously generous—and feel ridiculously good
9. I really like Mr Beast’s frugality and financial sense: How Much Money MrBeast Makes | The Full Story

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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